Hello ...
Here's your Cosmic Pursuits newsletter for June 2025!
1. There are plenty of planetary conjunctions this month with Mercury putting on a leisurely apparition in the western sky after sunset, Mars slowly easing itself westwards towards the Sun, and Venus and Saturn wandering about in the eastern morning sky. The Milky Way wheels into view in the southeast earlier each night. And the Sun continues to hatch new sunspots and occasional (and unpredictable) coronal
mass ejections that spur aurorae over much of the world. Here's what to see in the Night Sky This Month...
2. Just for fun, I aimed
a small 60 mm refractor up out of the plane of the Milky Way into intergalactic space and snapped some photos of galaxies in and around Ursa Major to see what I could capture. And what did I see in the background? Quite a bit, actually...
3. Adam Reiss, a Nobel Prize winner and co-discoverer of the accelerating expansion of the universe, joins a growing group of cosmologists who think that, perhaps, the universe isn't quite what we thought. A feature piece at the Atlantic (gift link).
4. Astronomers seem to have discovered a new dwarf planet
far (very far) beyond the orbit of Neptune. Here's why that spells bad news for those who hoped for the imminent discovery of Planet 9, a new major planet in our solar system.
5. Finally, I join the hosts of the excellent Actual Astronomy podcast to discuss some thrifty options for deep-sky telescopic observing in Episode #483. (Thrifty options for
telescopes? My wife will be relieved... a little).
And the astronomy quote of the month - a little motivation for all of us to get out and see the night sky:
"When it is darkest, men see the stars."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Wishing you clear skies!
Brian Ventrudo
Publisher
CosmicPursuits.com
