Topic
The week that followed the 12 August eclipse, night by night: the tail of the Perseids, two conjunctions, the Milky Way at its highest and Saturn coming back.
Tonight it rises at 22:44, and it will gain twenty minutes every week. More to the point, its rings are open again: edge-on and all but gone in March 2025, they now stand at 8.9 degrees. Here is the season's timetable up to the 4 October opposition, and what instrument it takes.
Mid-August is the best stretch of the year for the core of our galaxy. It is also the moment to say what nobody says: from Paris it culminates at 12.2 degrees, and it culminates in full twilight. Here is the real window, latitude by latitude, and what the thickness of air takes from you on the way.
Between 21:10 and 21:55, low in the west-south-west, a crescent lit to 11.9 % passes within seven degrees of Venus. It is also the best evening this month to see the dark limb of the Moon lit by the Earth. Here are the two quarter-hours that matter, and the arithmetic of what is doing the lighting.
Tomorrow morning the two planets will fit inside a circle one and a half times the width of the full Moon. They will also be four degrees above the horizon in an already brightening dawn. Here is the honest arithmetic: the hour, the altitude, the azimuth, and why half of you will see nothing.
The maximum fell last night. The stream itself stays active until 24 August. We computed, night by night, the radiant's altitude, the window of genuinely dark sky and what the Moon leaves of it. Six useful nights remain, and one date on which the door shuts.
There is nothing to buy and nothing to set up: the International Space Station is visible to the naked eye, and often brighter than the brightest star. You just have to know when. The answer depends on three things at once, and it changes every day.