On Saturday the 7th, if you are an early-riser, or must be on the road early, take a look in the SW sky about 6.15am. The international Space Station [ISS] will make a bright appearance above that SW horizon. In the next three-and-a-half minutes it will climb almost overhead, before dipping down towards the eastern horizon, before fading out.
This is a particularly bright appearance of the ISS and will be the brightest pinpoint object in the sky except that as it gets closer to the eastern horizon it is outshone by our sister planet [in size]. Venus is lurking right there having just risen, and giving its best shine before the sun rises and fades it out. However, Venus is at its brightest now and if you keep an eye on it you may be able to see it after the sun has risen. Venus and the moon are the only regular celestial objects that can be seen in daylight.
The moon gets in the way of things at the end of the month, but on the 24th it plonks itself right by planet Saturn. The moon will be in its gibbous state, about three-quarters full, on its way to getting full by the 29th.
This is a particularly good time to see two of our nearest dwarf galaxies – yes, with the unaided eye. Around mid-month when the moon is not in the picture, get out to a dark place and give your eyes five minutes to adjust to the dark. Both galaxies, the small [SMC] and large [LMC] Magellanic clouds, as they are called, are visible in the southern sky.
Halfway up the southern sky is the bright star Achernar and SMC is just southwest of it. It’s just a small patch of light, but it is over 18,000 light-years across [that’s almost 20 quadrillion kilometres, by the way] and contains several hundred million stars. The reason it looks just a patch of light is that it is 200,000 light years away, which is beyond the far reaches of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which you can see as that great band of light across the sky.
The large Magellanic cloud, LMC, lies south of SMC, just above the brilliant star Canopus that is lurking on the southern horizon. It is somewhat closer to us than the smaller cloud, and much larger at 32,000 light years across, encompassing about 20 billion stars. [Note that our Milky Way, contains about 400 billion stars.] Interestingly, the LMC is predicted to merge with our Milky Way in about 2.4 billion years.
