See A Marvelous Mars-Moon Conjunction: The Night Sky This Week
The galactic centre area of the Milky Way in Sagittarius behind the grand old barn near home in ... More southern Alberta, on June 30, 2019. (Photo by: Alan Dyer/VWPics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Each Monday, I pick out North America's celestial highlights for the week ahead (which also apply to mid-northern latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere). Check my main feed for more in-depth articles on stargazing, astronomy, eclipses and more.
The Night Sky This Week: June 23-29, 2025
With solstice out of the way, the evenings lengthen in the Northern Hemisphere. Not much, but just enough to allow some stargazing to be done. That is helped somewhat by the moon, which this week is a beautiful slim crescent in the pre-dawn sky, where it will dazzle with Venus. Meanwhile, in the quiet hours after midnight, the Milky Way begins to look its best. Here's everything you need to know about stargazing and astronomy this week:
Monday, June 23: Crescent Moon And The Pleiades
Monday, June 23: Crescent Moon And The Pleiades
A spectacular sight awaits if you have the willpower to get up really early. Look east-northeast from around 3:30 a.m. local time for a slim waning crescent moon rising less than half a degree from the Pleiades open cluster of stars (also known as M45 and the Seven Sisters), with Venus shining brightly close by. Stunning!
Thursday, June 26: Crescent Moon, Mercury And Gemini
Thursday, June 26: Crescent Moon, Mercury And Gemini
About 45 minutes after sunset, scan the west-northwest horizon to find a paper-thin waxing crescent Moon — just 3.4%-lit — alongside Mercury and Gemini's twin stars, Castor and Pollux. Each of the four objects will appear to be a couple of degrees apart.
Friday, June 27: Crescent Moon And Mercury
Friday, June 27: Crescent Moon And Mercury
A slightly plumper crescent moon, now 9%-lit, will this evening shine to the upper-right of tiny Mercury, a planet that is rarely this simple to see. Earthshine — sunlight reflected from clouds and oceans — will be visible on the moon's shadowed side.
Saturday, June 28: Moon, Regulus And Mars
Saturday, June 28: Moon, Regulus And Mars
Another post-sunset viewing of the crescent moon, now 16%-lit and climbing higher into the western sky, will also clock bright star Regulus and the planet Mars. They'll appear a couple of degrees from each other.
Sunday, June 29: Moon And Mars In Conjunction
Sunday, June 29: Moon And Mars In Conjunction
Here's the week's celestial highlight — a very close conjunction of the moon and Mars. During the event, which will take place after sunset in the west, the two solar system objects will appear less than a fifth of a degree apart at their closest. Get everyone outside looking up at this rare and beautiful sight.
The galactic core region of the Milky Way over Maskinonge Pond and Sofa Mountain at Waterton Lakes ... More National Park, Alberta on an early June night. (Photo by: Alan Dyer/VW Pics/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Object of the Week: June's Milky Way
Though technically visible year-round, the Milky Way begins to impress in late June for Northern Hemisphere sky-watchers. Around midnight, the galaxy's core begins to rise in the south, its billions of stars visible to anyone with clear dark skies (ideally Bortle class 1–3) and the patience to allow their eyes to adapt to the dark (night vision takes at least 20–30 minutes). Ignore your smartphone, use a red flashlight and look — you'll be amazed at how clear it looks and how relaxed you'll become watching our galaxy arc across the night sky.
The times and dates given apply to mid-northern latitudes. For the most accurate location-specific information, consult online planetariums like Stellarium.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Yahoo
Pitcher this: MUN herbarium home to thousands of N.L. botanicals
In a room full of tall metal cabinets, Julissa Roncal carefully flicks through stacks of manila folders. They're filled with pages of expertly pressed and dried plant specimens. "See the little berries there? How do you dry a fleshy fruit and put it on a paper, completely dry?" she said, pulling out a page with a flat, dry branch with berries on it. They're perfectly preserved and dated 1966. "It does take a lot of time, effort and art to put those fleshy fruits on a dried specimen that will last for decades." Roncal is the curator of the Memorial University Agnes Marion Ayre Herbarium. The collection has about 100,000 specimens tucked in a small office on Mount Scio Road. "They are basically cataloged or distributed following a particular order that represents the classification," she explained. "Each specimen is labelled with the year it was collected, the person who collected it, and where it was found." She said about 80 to 90 per cent of the specimens are from Newfoundland and Labrador, and the rest are from other parts of the world. The collection, Roncal said, is not only important for research and history, but because it belongs to the people of the province. "This is a specimen of the Newfoundland provincial flower," she said, pulling out a page with a dried pitcher plant adhered to it, titled Carbonear, 1945. For decades, researchers and botanists have dried, pressed, and preserved specimens from three main categories: algae, mosses and vascular plants. The collection is used to train biology students at MUN, who learn about databases, manipulating large data sets, and get experience in botany and biology in systematics, taxonomy and species distribution. "We can extract DNA, for example, from these specimens for genomics research," Roncal said. And depending on the research, the collection can also aid in climatological research. "We can also track whether these species have changed their flowering times or their physiologies throughout time," she said. "For example, we can detect whether a particular species is flowering sooner or later and correlate it with climate change, so that information can be observed or rescued from the information that is hosted or housed here." Roncal said there are about sixteen thousand specimens digitized and accessible to the public. Work at the herbarium started years before Roncal's tenure as curator. She describes the herbarium's namesake — Agnes Marion Ayre — as an influential figure. "She was a suffragist, she fought for women's rights, for voting. So she's definitely an inspiration beyond botany for all of us," she said. Ayre was an amateur botanist, and collected and preserved some of the specimens in the collection. Roncal said those contributions were the starting point. "So it is the result of decades of botanical exploration and accumulation of these specimens," she said. But Ayre didn't just catalogue plant species she found, she also painted them with watercolours while in the field. There are about two thousand of Ayre's paintings between the Centre for Newfoundland Studies and the herbarium. It's a process that Roncal said added more detail than a typical press would. "Painting allows you to devote time to deep, thorough observation of the plant that you have in front of you," Roncal said, looking at a painting from the 1920s. "So that's why the combination of both is ideal to really get to know what species and identify with confidence what you're looking at," she said. "And putting a name to what you're looking at." Roncal said her team is working on digitizing the rest of the collection to make it more accessible. Download our to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Sign up for our . Click .
New York Times
12 hours ago
- New York Times
This Is Not the Way We Usually Imagine the World Will End
If our species manages to hang on for a few billion additional years, we might be in for a wild ride — stars passing in the vicinity of the sun could cause planets in our solar system to collide or even be ejected, according to a paper published last month in the journal Icarus. The findings even suggest a scenario in which our world ends not consumed by the sun, but in a carom prompted by the powers of gravity. The Milky Way is home to hundreds of billions of stars. Each one is in motion, zinging in its own orbit around the galactic center. Consider a long enough span of time — something astronomers are wont to do — and it's inevitable that another star will pass closer to the sun than Proxima Centauri, currently our nearest stellar neighbor. In fact, calculations based on orbits of stars cataloged by the Gaia spacecraft suggest that, every million years, 33 stars, give or take a few, do just that. But for another star's gravitational effects to have a sizable impact on our solar system, you need a much closer shave than that, according to Nate Kaib, an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. 'Once you get a couple hundred times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, you can really start to destabilize stuff,' he said. Dr. Kaib and Sean Raymond, an astronomer at the Bordeaux Astrophysical Laboratory in France, set about determining the likelihood and effects of such cosmic near misses. The researchers ran thousands of computer simulations, modeling the gravitational effects of passing stars on the solar system's eight planets and Pluto. The team considered stars with masses, velocities and orbits representative of objects in our stellar neighborhood. Each simulation modeled the passage of five billion years. Dr. Kaib said that such a long-term perspective is necessary because it often takes tens of millions of years or even longer for a planet's orbit to be perturbed by a passing star. 'You don't see the effects for a long, long time,' he said. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
19 hours ago
- Yahoo
Rocks in Canada's Quebec province found to be the oldest on Earth
By Will Dunham (Reuters) -Along the eastern shore of Hudson Bay in Canada's northeastern province of Quebec, near the Inuit municipality of Inukjuak, resides a belt of volcanic rock that displays a blend of dark and light green colors, with flecks of pink and black. New testing shows that these are Earth's oldest-known rocks. Two different testing methods found that rocks from an area called the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in northern Quebec date to 4.16 billion years ago, a time known as the Hadean eon. The eon is named after the ancient Greek god of the underworld, Hades, owing to the hellish landscape thought to have existed then on Earth. The research indicates that the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt harbors surviving fragments of Earth's oldest crust, the planet's outermost solid shell. The Nuvvuagittuq rocks are mainly metamorphosed volcanic rocks of basaltic composition. Metamorphosed rock is a kind that has been changed by heat and pressure over time. Basalt is a common type of volcanic rock. The rocks tested in the new study were called intrusions. That means they formed when magma - molten rock - penetrated existing rock layers and then cooled and solidified underground. The researchers applied two dating methods based on an analysis of the radioactive decay of the elements samarium and neodymium contained in them. Both produced the same conclusion - that the rocks were 4.16 billion years old. Future chemical analyses of these rocks could provide insight into Earth's conditions during the Hadean, a time shrouded in mystery because of the paucity of physical remains. "These rocks and the Nuvvuagittuq belt being the only rock record from the Hadean, they offer a unique window into our planet's earliest time to better understand how the first crust formed on Earth and what were the geodynamic processes involved," said University of Ottawa geology professor Jonathan O'Neil, who led the study published on Thursday in the journal Science. The rocks may have formed when rain fell on molten rock, cooling and solidifying it. That rain would have been composed of water evaporated from Earth's primordial seas. "Since some of these rocks were also formed from precipitation from the ancient seawater, they can shed light on the first oceans' composition, temperatures and help establish the environment where life could have begun on Earth," O'Neil said. Until now, the oldest-known rocks were ones dating to about 4.03 billion years ago from Canada's Northwest Territories, O'Neil said. While the Nuvvuagittuq samples are now the oldest-known rocks, tiny crystals of the mineral zircon from western Australia have been dated to 4.4 billion years old. The Hadean ran from Earth's formation roughly 4.5 billion years ago until 4.03 billion years ago. Early during this eon, a huge collision occurred that is believed to have resulted in the formation of the moon. But by the time the Nuvvuagittuq rocks formed, Earth had begun to become a more recognizable place. "The Earth was certainly not a big ball of molten lava during the entire Hadean eon, as its name would suggest. By nearly 4.4 billion years ago, a rocky crust already existed on Earth, likely mostly basaltic and covered with shallow and warmer oceans. An atmosphere was present, but different than the present-day atmosphere," O'Neil said. There had been some controversy over the age of Nuvvuagittuq rocks. As reported in a study published in 2008, previous tests on samples from the volcanic rock layers that contained the intrusions yielded conflicting dates - one giving an age of 4.3 billion years and another giving a younger age of 3.3 to 3.8 billion years. O'Neil said the discrepancy may have been because the method that produced the conclusion of a younger age was sensitive to thermal events that have occurred since the rock formed, skewing the finding. The new study, with two testing methods producing harmonious conclusions on the age of the intrusion rocks, provides a minimum age for the volcanic rocks that contain these intrusions, O'Neil added. "The intrusion would be 4.16 billion years old, and because the volcanic rocks must be older, their best age would be 4.3 billion years old, as supported by the 2008 study," O'Neil said.
