Hello ...
Here's your Cosmic Pursuits newsletter for June 2026!
1. You can see all five bright planets emerge this month. Brilliant Venus enjoys a close conjunction with Jupiter on the 9th with Mercury not far away. Saturn rises about 2:30 a.m. local time at mid-month. Mars climbs slow and low in the east before sunrise and joins the Moon and Pleiades on the 13th. North American observers can see the Moon pass in front of Venus in the daylight sky on
the 17th – a moderately spectacular event! And a Strawberry 'Mini Moon' arrives as June winds down. Here's what to see in the Night Sky This Month...
2. While you're out stargazing, if you live at higher latitudes in either hemisphere, look for the electric-blue lacework of noctilucent clouds lighting the sky near midnight. These clouds arise from water vapor frozen onto tiny dust particles from burnt-up meteors in the upper atmosphere and set
aglow by a shallow setting sun. It's worth the effort to spot these marvels of the mesosphere.
3. After the Artemis II mission to the Moon concluded, NASA compiled and released thousands of additional
photographs from the astronauts on this historic mission. The team at the photo website Petapixel published a few of the finest of these images - they are absolutely breathtaking!
4.
See a meteor photobomb an erupting volcano.
5. My good colleagues and fellow Canadians at the Actual Astronomy podcast (in episode #536) discuss how and what to observe when the Moon is out and obscuring fainter objects. Or as I always say, never let a clear sky go to waste!
And the astronomy quote of the month:
“No one regards what is before his feet; we all gaze at the stars.”
- Quintus Ennius
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Wishing you clear skies!
Brian Ventrudo
Publisher
CosmicPursuits.com
