July is peak galaxy appreciation month, and the Milky Way is putting on a show. This episode, we’re grabbing our stargazing snacks and heading outside to soak in that big, hazy river of light across the sky.

Whether you're deep in the bush or just squinting past your neighbour’s porch light, we’ll help you spot it. We'll also help you find the Southern Cross and introduce you to the dark emu hiding in plain sight. Spoiler: it’s not made of stars but the dark bits between them.

Also, on this week’s tour of the cosmos:

• July 4th is when Earth is furthest from the Sun. No, that’s not why it’s cold
• Venus and Jupiter are up early and looking gorgeous
• Sagittarius is pointing straight at the centre of the galaxy. We call it the big messy spaghetti
• The Vera Rubin Observatory has a camera the size of a small car and a mission to map the entire night sky. Every three days. For ten years. It cost a billion bucks and it’s going to change astronomy forever
• Vera Rubin helped prove dark matter exists. She deserved a Nobel Prize and didn’t get one. We’re still salty about it
• There are over 130 million bits of space junk out there bigger than a centimetre. Who’s watching all that? We are. Kind of

Need more sky stuff?

• scitech.org.au
• theskytonight