2019 Week 26: (June 23-June 29)

This week in the sky our innermost planet will be at its greatest elongation in the easterly direction.  Also, at 21°N declination it is well placed for Northern Hemisphere observers.

Date	Event
June 23	Mercury Greatest Elongation East (25°)
June 25	Last Quarter
June 27	Uranus 5°N of Moon

The Sun will set at 9:54pm this week and Mercury will follow more than an hour an a half later at 11:25pm. 

Mercury

This will provide ample time to glimpse the diminutive planet in the twilight sky.  At magnitude 0.6 it may be naked eye to the keen observer.  If you pack a set of binoculars you will see both Mercury and Mars within the same field of view.  The interesting non-intuitive thing will be that Mars is currently 3 times dimmer than Mercury.  The reason for this is Mars currently resides on the opposite side of the Sun to us; Mercury is much closer.  This is depicted in the image below.

Planetary Positions, June 23, 2019

The Moon will reach its Last Quarter phase this Tuesday and will be positioned in the early morning sky as it will rise around 02:00.  Three nights later the Moon will be in conjunction with Uranus which is currently sitting in Aries after spending several years in Pisces.

There are three rocket launches scheduled for this week.  Watch them live online.  In the afternoon of Monday June 24, a Chinese Long March 3B rocket will add a satellite to their navigation network.  Later in the evening a Falcon Heavy will be taking a bunch of military and scientific satellites into orbit.  This is a great one to watch as it is currently the largest rocket in operation.

Several evenings later an Electron rocket will take several payloads into orbit from New Zealand.

Date	Event
June 24	Long March 3B - Beidou (12:00)
June 24	Falcon Heavy - STP-2 (21:30)
June 27	Electron - Make it Rain (10:30)

This Summer we will have a special program that will be coming to every branch of the Calgary Public Library.  A detailed scheduled can be found at the link below.

https://calgary.rasc.ca/libraries2019.htm

This program is geared toward all members of the public and is generally recommended for those age 10 and above.  We will spend 20 minutes discussing what you can see in the Summer night sky and how to use a basic telescope.  The next part of the program will give participants a hands-on demonstration of the variety of telescopes in use today.  At the end we will take everyone outside with a special solar telescope to see the features on the Sun.  Hopefully we will have sunspots or prominences!  If it is cloudy we will instead spend more time inside watching educational astronomy videos.  Don't worry if you miss your chance with the solar scope, come to another branch on a sunny day!

Solar Telescope

We hope to see you out at one of the branches this Summer.  There will also be an observing contest for the youth with great prizes, so don't miss out!