Welcome to the University of Texas Skywatchers Report for Monday July 28th through Sunday August 3rd.
The moon is at first quarter early on Friday August 1st, so we’ll have a waxing crescent moon for the first part of the week and a waxing gibbous moon for the weekend.
Mercury is in inferior conjunction with the sun on August 1st when it will pass between the Earth and the Sun and will move from our evening skies into our morning skies.
Mars is low in the west at sunset and is setting at 10:45 p.m. at midweek. Look for Mars just off the limb of the moon on Monday night.
Saturn is rising at 11 p.m. at midweek as it heads towards opposition in mid-September. Neptune is still near Saturn and the two planets will continue to move slightly closer together over this week and next.
Venus is rising at 4 a.m., still almost three hours before sunrise. Jupiter is rising at 4:45 a.m., about two hours before sunrise.
In space anniversaries this week, Wednesday July 30 marks 415 years since Galileo Galilei observed the rings of Saturn, although the poor optics of his early telescope kept him from determining their true nature. Galileo’s hypothesis was that it was a triple body system but was confused a few years later when the bodies to either side of Saturn seemed to disappear, when in fact the Earth was passing through the ring plane and therefore, they were edge-on and couldn’t be seen. Almost 50 years later, Christiaan Huygens used a higher quality telescope to observe the system and correctly proposed that Saturn was encircled by a thin, flat ring.
There will be no public viewing this summer on the UT campus telescopes so we can do maintenance and repairs. We expect to resume the regular viewing schedule in the Fall 2025 semester.
While you’re waiting for Austin-area telescope viewing to resume, you can tune in to McDonald Observatory live streams from west Texas. You can view past events on the McDonald Observatory YouTube channel and you can follow the observatory on social media and at McDonaldObservatory.org to be notified of future events.
Thank you for calling the University of Texas Skywatchers Report.
