SkyCaramba

A traditional blue moon is coming up. That's not the second full moon of the month.

Mars and Mercury are close this week.

And learn how to identify the satellites and space junk you see going overhead.

Venus passes by a star named Zavijava this week. The name is fun to say. Find out what it means.

Viewing this year's Perseids meteor shower should be good.

A celestial swan flies high in the August evening skies. Hear some of the old legends about how it got there.

There are a couple of close pairings this month--Venus and Zavijava and then Mars and Mercury. Saturn and Jupiter are both at opposition. Northern hemisphere viewers have a chance to see the northern and southern crowns. Several animal constellations feature well this month. And there's a meteor shower that produces what some call the tears of St. Lawrence.

In astronomy, the person who first sees an object isn't necessarily the person who gets credit for discovering it. The discoverer is the one who recognizes it as something new or different. If you think it's a star, but someone else figures out it's a planet, you'll be lucky to get a footnote for "precovery" in a chapter about someone else's discovery. Usually, only a few years pass between precovery and discovery. But in one case, several astronomers saw an object and called it a star for more than two centuries before someone realized what it really was.

It doesn't make sense that stars shining at magnitude 31.5 are among the dimmest the Hubble Space Telescope can see, while one shining at 0 is one of the brightest in the sky. And objects with magnitudes below 0 are even brighter! How can the lower number mean a brighter body? It starts making sense when you understand how this measurement system got started more than 2,000 years ago.

And find out what's happening in the sky the week of July 18 through 24, 2021.

A popular misconception says toilet water goes one way in the northern hemisphere and the other way in the southern hemisphere. Unless your toilet's a giant lake, its location doesn't make a difference.

Follow Venus and Mars in the evening sky while Jupiter and Saturn continue rising earlier.

A half-man, half-horse crosses southern skies. Much of the world only gets a partial view of him. In the northern hemisphere, the visible part of this constellation looks like something we keep in our kitchens.

And find out what to expect from Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mercury this week.

Venus meets Mars in the evening sky. Jupiter and Saturn continue their morning co-dominance. And they help out with identification of two meteor showers. Mercury moves into the morning.

Also, there's an upcoming anniversary of a total solar eclipse associated with a hit song. Are people mistakenly thinking the song is about that event?

On the way from Earth to the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, one would pass a bright orange star that happens to be the bright star in Scorpius.

An arrow crosses the night sky this time of year. Several ancient legends tell who may have shot it and who might have been its target.

And find out what to look for in the skies the week of June 20 to 26, 2021

An ancient world story tells us that when some priests were in a "hairy" situation, an astronomer saved their lives by pointing out a faint yet majestic patch of stars.

It may be getting warmer where you live, but Earth is almost as far away from the sun as it gets.

Astronomical sights for the week of June 13 to 19, 2021