Starry Night This Week

Each week most PBS stations air "Jack Horkheimer: Star Gazer", the world's first and only weekly TV series on naked-eye astronomy. The Starry Night images on this page illustrate the show for the week of Monday July 27, 2008. You can view the complete show script, or watch a RealPlayer video of the show.

How to Find the Two Comets That Never Were

Northern hemisphere viewers looking south on early August evenings will see Scorpius riding high near the centre of the Milky Way.

Using a pair of 7x50 binoculars (the standard camping or birding size), you can find the clusters M6 and M7 from Charles Messier's list of things that are not comets. Point your binoculars at the end of Scorpius' tail, and look up and to the left just a bit. Shaula and Lesath, at the point of the fishhook, are close enough to the clusters that you can see all of them at the same time.

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Click here for an archive of the past shows.