Month: June 2021

We’ve always had a fascination with the stars, bright beacons of light that come alive when the sky darkens. They’ve been revered as gods, used to mark changes in the seasons, and as a way to navigate the globe. It’s difficult to trace back when exactly people started looking up and taking note of familiar patterns that were formed by these points of light, but some propose that 17,000-year-old cave paintings in Lascaux, France, depict the constellations we today know as Taurus and Orion. Ancient cultures across the world saw…

Best-selling writer Jeffrey Kluger, author of “Apollo 13” with astronaut James Lovell, will launch a virtual tour Tuesday (June 1) to promote his first fiction book, “Holdout.” The book, which will be released Aug. 3 by Dutton (an imprint of Penguin Random House), follows the fictional character Walli Beckwith, a “celebrated astronaut” who works to raise environmental awareness during a mission on the International Space Station (ISS). “The Amazon rainforest is burning and its Indigenous people are being exterminated— and the Brazilian government (and any governments standing by) are to…

During June we’ll see Venus continue to struggle to get ever-so-higher in western evening twilight sky, while Mars, which continues to recede from Earth, starts dropping progressively lower in the early evening western sky. Saturn and Jupiter provide telescopic targets in the after-midnight hours. Mercury is too close to the sun to be seen for much of June, but begins to emerge from the bright glow of dawn at the end of month, though still quite difficult to be seen.  In our schedule, remember that when measuring the angular separation…