Hello ...
Here's your Cosmic Pursuits newsletter for August 2025!
1. August brings some lovely planetary alignments and conjunctions as Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury play tag with each other, the Moon, and a pair of star clusters in the eastern morning sky before sunrise. Mars lingers – barely – in the west before it eases itself to the twilight horizon, while Saturn and Neptune move into view together in the late evening hours. The reliable Perseid meteor shower peaks on
August 12-13 with the waning gibbous Moon obscuring the faintest meteors but leaving the brightest plainly visible. Moon or not, it’s the best meteor shower of the year. Here's what to see in the Night Sky This Month...
2. Grab your binoculars, find some dark sky, and tour the rich Cygnus Star Cloud, the brightest and largest stellar agglomeration of the distant Milky Way north of the celestial equator.
3. Scientists discover Bogong moths navigate their 1000 kilometer journeys using the light of the Milky Way.
4. Trevor Jones at Astrobackyard.com reviews the Seestar 30 smart telescope from ZWO.
5. Astronomers have discovered a third interstellar object (ISO) passing through the solar system. Here's what we know so far about the intriguing 3I/Atlas.
And the astronomy quote of the month - a little motivation for all of us to get out and see the night sky:
"I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth. Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here."
- Johannes Kepler (self-composed epitaph)
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Wishing you clear skies!
Brian Ventrudo
Publisher
CosmicPursuits.com
