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 April 4th, 2011. You can view the complete show script, or download an iTunes/iPod video of the show.

Awesome Arcturus, Star of a Million Years

Follow the arc of the Big Dipper's handle to the bright star Arcturus, which is at the point of the kite-shaped constellation Boštes.

A thousand years from now, Arcturus will have moved closer to the constellation Virgo (marked by the Diamond asterism in this graphic). The distance it will have appeared to move on our sky will be over the width of a full Moon! The rest of the stars in Virgo and Boštes are moving through space as well, of course, but from Earth the one whose motion is most visible is Arcturus.