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Today we are going to be looking ahead to the month of May, starting on the 1st of May. This is May Day, or Lá Fhéile Bealtaine in Irish, Bealtaine being the month of May. We’re going to start with sunset on the 1st, because the 1st of May is a Full Moon. We can still see Venus and Jupiter in the evening. Venus will be after moving past Uranus so we’re not going to see Uranus next to Venus in the sky. Uranus will end up behind the Sun as we get little further into May and we can see that Venus is sinking down pretty early in the evening as well.

The Full Moon will be rising as the Sun sets on May Day, it’s 99.7% for us here in Ireland. That percentage doesn’t go up over the course of the night, so it looks like 99.7% is just about all we get. Of course, once we get into May, the nights will be getting noticeably shorter, we still have a little bit of light in the sky after 10 o’clock. Of course, this is from Ireland, very high on the northern hemisphere, so it does stay bright much longer once we get into summertime compared to lower latitudes. As the Moon rises it will have a little bit of a orange-yellow colour, which the Full Moon usually has when it rises as the Sun sets. We get to see that nice and late here in Ireland, due to how late the Sun is setting. Within an hour or so the Moon will be back to that kind of grayish-white color that we would normally associate with it. The lunar cycle is 29 and a half days long, so if we’re seeing the Full Moon here on the 1st of May, that means we’re going to have another Full Moon by the end of May, the month is longer than the lunar cycle.

Turning back around here to the south we’ll go all the way through to the end of May. By the 30th the Moon is back to 99.6% full. It’s 99.4% full on the 31st, so it looks like on the 30th the Moon is just a little bit fuller, at least from here in Ireland. So that’s another Full Moon rising in May. The Full Moon that we have in May, the second full moon that we have in May, is a Blue Moon. There are multiple ways to describe a Blue Moon. Usually the Blue Moon is the second Full Moon you get in one calendar month, that’s the definition that we’re using here. Another definition for the Blue Moon is that it’s the third Full Moon out of four Full Moons that you get in one season, when one season normally only has three Full Moons. There is a couple of ways to define the Full Moon, but this is the second Full Moon in one calendar month, so calling this the Blue Moon is one of the easiest definitions. Coming up to 11 o’clock at the end of May the sky is still quite bright. Jupiter and Venus will be getting quite close together as the Sun is setting, but we’re going to move back to mid-May because just around mid-May will be our New Moon.

With the Moon selected, we can make absolutely sure that the New Moon is on the 16th, the Moon will be at 0.1% full, so very new indeed. Venus and Jupiter of course are both very bright, so they’ll come out nice and early in mid May. Nice and early in mid-May is 9:50, so it’s still pretty late before the brightest things come out. We’ve completely lost Orion, we’ve completely lost Taurus, they’re all gone, we’re not even seeing all of Auriga for very long, even though Capella is circumpolar and it will stay up. Looking straight into the middle of the sky on the 16th of May and we’ve already got Virgo taking up the middle of the sky, that sort of prime position. We can follow the handle of the plough arcing to Arcturus and spiking onto Spica right in the middle of the sky at just 11:50. We are using summer time, so we are an hour ahead of the actual local midnight. If we come up to midnight on the clock, we’ll see the plough still up at the zenith. If we move forward to our physical midnight of closer to 1:30/1:20, then we’ve got a very different sky. Leo is already leaving the sky, followed by Virgo. We do have Libra, Libra is very difficult to see, but Scorpius is not.

Now on the 17th just after passing our physical midnight, the summer triangle is completely above the horizon, we’ve got Scorpius and technically we have Sagittarius as well, just a little bit blocked out by the light pollution and the atmosphere. Before we head into the countryside, we’re going to move back to a little bit earlier in May. Back to the 1st of May at sunset. As the sky reaches darkness, not all of the Summer Triangle is above the horizon. According to the Summer Triangle, we’re still not totally in summer, but we’re close, we only have to wait until nearly 1 o’clock in the morning for the Summer Triangle to totally be up. So we’re not quite in summertime by the beginning of May. If we head back to the very end of May, back to the Blue Moon, all of the Summer triangle is above the horizon just as it’s getting dark. That’s our transition really from not summertime into summertime, according to the Summer Triangle, that’s happening in May. By late May Deneb and Vega are nice and high at sunset, with Altair just piercing through the sunset glow low to the horizon in the East.

Now going to move back to the middle of the month, back to the New Moon, and we’re going to move up to our local midnight, just about 1:30. Now we’re going to move into the countryside because we have the Summer Triangle up and we have Scorpius up. This is going to give us a good view of the Milky Way, and we’re still far enough from summer in mid May that the sky isn’t going to be bright all night long. We’re not going to have astronomical twilight reaching through the entire night. That means you will get a chance to see the glow of the Milky Way in actual darkness before things get too bright. From a dark sky we’ve got the Milky Way finally up, taking a strong position in the sky and staying visible for a couple of hours. The Milky Way will be rising a little bit after sunset with the Summer Triangle. By midnight on the clock, we’ll have a good bit of the Milky Way up, the core of the Milky Way is definitely up by about 2 o’clock and just starting to fade at about 3:30. We have plenty of time to see the glow of the Milky Way, it’s finally getting into the time where the Milky Way is going to look good without getting washed out by the glow of the Sun, which will become a problem once we get another month into the future, once we get into June.

If you’d like to see a dark sky like, you can head to your local dark sky park, your local dark sky reserve. Here in Ireland the Dark Sky Park in Kerry in the Iveragh Peninsula, and the Dark Sky Reserve in Mayo in the Nephin Wetlands, those are the official dark skies in Ireland. There’s plenty of other regions in Ireland where the sky is dark, but those are the official regions. Saturn will be coming back in the morning, and as we move further into May, it only gets further from the Sun and easier to see. Saturn’s really getting visible in May, whereas those other planets that were visible in the morning in April, Mercury and Mars, are still out of view. Mars is going to take a while to get into the sky and visible. Mercury, of course, was going into retrograde, it’s over on the other side of the Sun no doubt by this date and not in a good position for us to see. Of course, Mercury rarely is. We’re going to come back to sunset, we’re going to come back to the middle of the night. Saturn will be visible in the morning, but we’re going to bring up our meteor showers because we have the Eta Aquariids coming up in May.

The Eta Aquariids radiate from Aquarius and their radiant is coming up above the horizon just before the Sun rises, so they’re not in a great position for us. They are variable meteor shower, they can be quite productive, up to 85, so not quite as productive as the Lyrids, but still pretty productive. Their peak is on the 6th of May, which is good. Closer to the beginning of the month, they’re going to be visible in a greater level of darkness. They’re up to 81 just as the Sun is rising. It looks like they’re going to hit their peak just after the sunrise for us here in Ireland. Our local rate is going to be pretty low and we won’t be able to get a high rate of the Aquarids, unlike we did with the Lyrids. We can’t wait for the Aquariid radiant to get higher in the sky, once the radiant of the Aquariids gets higher in the sky, the Sun rises and it all gets blocked out.

The Eta Aquariids or η-Aquariids, the little symbol at the front is the Greek letter “eta” and they are the Aquariids. You will see the Eta Aquarids with only one “i” written in various places. The one “i” versus two “i”‘s, Aquarids / Aquariids, that’s down to Latin grammar. Really it should be the Aquariids, the Eta Aquariids, of Aquarius, but Latin is a language that not many people speak, and even the people who do speak it no doubt acknowledge that it has a baroque declension system in its nouns. The Eta Aquariids, the Eta Aquarids, the Eta Aqarids, if you want to pronounce it really badly, as I have done in the past, that’s the meteor shower that’s coming up and we’ll talk about it in more detail as we get later into the month. We can see the Eta Lyrids as well, also peaking in May, so it looks like we have a couple of meteor showers that we can take a look at, as well as the different constellations that are in the sky.

There’s really been a change now since April, from April to May is a much bigger change than from March to April, so we’ll take a bigger look at the constellations in a future piece as well. I do hope you enjoyed this preview of what we’re going to see in the course of the coming month. If you did enjoy this piece, then please do like it. If you like this kind of content, then please subscribe to this website and my YouTube channel. Thank you very much for watching and hopefully I’ll see you back here next time.