Lunar Observation Guide

Currently the sun's core is fifteen million degrees. On its surface five thousand five hundred degrees, but that is as nothing compared to Wolf Ray at stars, where just the surface temperatures are of the order of two hundred thousand degrees. And this is as nothing compared to the later stages of the sun's life, where upon becoming a red giant the core temperature will be in the order of a hundred million degrees. But all of this is as nothing when compared to the UK in the fourth week of May 2026. The king's swans have evaporated, the beaches are covered in screaming children and more naked British tattooed flesh than faced the Romans at Medway in 43 CE. Some pretend it is a pleasant , a nice change, a a wonderful gift of mother nature. These people need help and almost certainly shopping sports direct. Shun them. Pay them no heed. It was so hot today that on opening my cornetto I, witnessed the instantaneous ablation of frozen milk substitute, spontaneous combustion of corn syrup based cone, and then witnessed the chocolate adjacent source provide ultimate proof of Einstein's mass energy equivalents So with all about me rivers of lava and anything of worth glowing hotter than Bealzeb's knackers, it's time to jump into the cool, refreshing stream that is astronomy and space. I'm Paul. And I'm Jenny. And this is episode 175 of Warsome Astronomy for June 2026. Screams of people burning in hell but it's just will cheer Ah how the devil are you? Oh bloody boiling Oh god, it's oh is everyone in the UK is gonna be reminiscing back of this. It's probably gonna be pissing down by the time people are listening to this. Oh yeah. Oh and I I think literally, I mean right now. Yeah. Right now, I know for a fact. I mean the the weather app says it's twenty three outside. I mean it's this is now what? We're we're twenty past nine almost in the evening. Yeah, as we're recording. It reckons it's twenty-three in the shade outside. Yeah, my app saying twenty-four where I am. I'm calling bollocks on that. I agree. I know for a fact my dining room thermometer, which is very accurate, is saying twenty-seven, twenty-eight degrees in the dining room right now. Yeah. I am sweating like a fingin devil's testicle right now. Yeah. Right. Yeah. My so when we started doing our preamble, which we always have before we smash that record button, my thermometer said 28.6. And obviously to record we,'ve got to shut all the windows and doors, right? It is now reading 28 .8 . So my room is climbing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it it's so humid and warm. We we we did have a big thunderstorm just now. Well I'll say back. Yeah, you did, yeah. Two hours ago we had a big thunderstorm. It helped for a moment and we had that lovely smell of petrachor. Mm-mm . Give me some of that soil bacteria. Um but oh my god it's got humid again. It's like 4. Yeah. Jesus, I I'm literally sitting here just sweating. It's it's so hot and humid. It's just absolute bonkers. I say it got it it was certainly in my office earlier was about thirty six. And that's in the shape. Yes. Yeah, you sent a photo and it was quite early on that your office got to thirty six as well. Yeah, well then so it got hotter. And I actually I just just for it like it's and giggles, popped the thermometer out in the sun on like outside my office just to see and it just went straight past forty and was just climbing and I was like, fuck at that, right? I'm gonna it's gonna melt. In the sun, it was so hot. I tell you what though, it's been lush for drying the washing. I do you know what? I struggled today 'cause it's so humid. Oh really? Oh that actually my washing didn't dry as well today. Did it n oh my stuff is all like bone dry but mind you I had it out all day so it was like in the sun. Yeah I did, but it it's actually so humid here today that just actually things the the the humidity level was actually like it was Yeah. Oh mine was all right. Yeah, mine mine is like bone dried. But yeah, my lavender was wilting in the middle of the day. This is such like a middle class conversation. It's like oh the wash is. Oh my lavender, my wash. Oh the lavender was wilted. Oh but it is like tomorrow it reckons it's gonna be thirty one here twice. A little little bit cooler, but I'm I'm I'm skeptical. But then it just tails off and Friday is twenty-two. I mean it's literally like Well nineteen for me on Friday, which I'm happy about. Yeah. The weekend is like twenty. Yeah, and it's raining for like a week. Like fourteen degrees cooler than at least than it was today. It's just bonkers but that's because I'm off to the land of America and I'm taking the sunshine with me. Oh you're taking sunshine with you, ain't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're you're off. I am. You're off. I am off. Off to the Apple Conference this year. I'm very excited. The Apple Conference. Oh you're going you're going you're going Apple, yeah. Yeah. So the the land of the the turtleneck jumper and the land of turtleneck jumper. Very weird. The land of all the shiny technology. I really want an apple goodie bag with like loads of free shit in it, but apparently that doesn't happen. It's just not good enough, isn't it? Like one of the we wealthiest companies in the world, you thought they'd give away free shit. Yeah. They could probably give every member everybody in that conference an iPad and it probably wouldn't even like scratch like the right. No but they don't I know. But you're gonna get as much swag as I can. So uh ladies and gentlemen place your bets on how many pens and pencils and tote bags I can I think you should nick something . You should you should you should do s do one for the people and steal something from Apple . Uh uh one of everything. I've had vision Pro phone toilet roll toilet roll from the box. Do you reckon it's embossed with Apple logos? If it's not, I'm gonna be a bit sad to be honest. Oh I reckon they use the three C shells, and if you know that reference audience I know that reference. Yeah, you see you know that reference. I got a reference! I never get references! Hey Demolition Valley! Yeah, I reckon they use the three seashells. Oh no, I I don't know. see the three three seashells. Sorry. I'm I'm very uh versing cursing though, so I'll be all right. Yeah. But yes, on the note of me going off to the land of America. It does mean that the next episode's gonna be a little bit different. Um, we're gonna do our middle of the month episode is going to be um a talk from Professor Stephen Eels of Cardiff University. Yeah. About his latest book. And then we will come back for a third instalment, so Lucky Duckies. And there we will just do a QA because it'll be sort of so late in the month. We'll just do I say QA in the sense of we'll be answering your emails. Um and then and then it'll be more like business as usual. That's our plan, isn't it? Mm-hmm it is indeed. It is indeed. Enjoy. It's a good talk. It's very good talk. It is. I very much enjoyed that talk. Steve is great. He's a really good communicator. Very, very good. Yeah, and it was really good fun like at Astro Camp. So this is a recording from Astro Camp actually, we should mention that. Mm-hmm. So you get get a little flavour of what Ashercamp is like. Again. Oh, and I have one other thing to mention as well before we get on to the news. Go on . So , go stargazing, right? Yeah. Have got three hundred thousand solar ecli pse glasses that they are trying to get rid of . You can get I think it's two hundred and fifty solar glasses for twenty quid. Or two hundred solar glasses for 20 quid. So if you are an astronomy club or even if you are a person who would like to give out solar eclipse glasses basically for free, right , head over to go stargazing or just Google like Go Stargazing Solo Eclipse Glasses. Nice. And it will come up. Um and yeah, it's it's literally twenty quid, a little bit of postage and packaging, but it dirt cheap, like ten pence for a pair of solar eclipse glasses. That solar eclipse is coming in the middle of August for the UK. So Nice. Get on it while they've still got 'em. But they've they've literally got a massive warehouse of 300,000 eclipse classes that they are trying to get rid of. So go stargazing. So probably pop to their website. Go stargazing. Get on it. Absolutely get on it. Cool So Jenny, shower us with knowledge like the naughty little astrology goblin that you are What the hell is that? The goblin sound. I don't want to know what you were goblin, but So we've got a bit of a JWST theme to kick off the news, and then I got something different just to round us off and finish with. Um and I think that's all right, because we haven't actually talked in great detail about JW ST for a little while. No, we went through a whole phase when it not long when it first went operational and we were just like JWST It was like every episode. Every time. Like almost like I think we did news things, which is all JWST like yeah many episodes ago but but we haven't really we've we've it's all got a bit quiet until now. But now there's some interesting stuff coming out again. I mean there's always interesting stuff from JWST but re like really cool stuff now. So my story is about the cosmic web , and that is web with two bees. You see what I did there? You see what you did there? I like that. You see what I did there? Okay, so I think most people listening have likely heard of the Hubble Deep Field. It was this apparently empty patch of sky that the Hubble Space Telescopes stared at for ten days over Christmas nineteen ninety five and Done by students, in fact. Yes. Done by students. Yeah. Because like no one wanted to work over Christmas except for the students. So they were like they had this pie in the sky idea pointing pointing the telescope at this like apparently empty patch of sky, and because it was Christmas, they were like, Yeah, alright then, because we all just want to go home. So never would have happened otherwise. But this patch of sky is is actually near the big dipper. Yeah. Um if you think about the end of the bowl, you got the two pointer stars to go to the north pole . The other two stars in the bowl, if you kind of extend them by about the same distance, that's roughly the patch of sky where the Hubble Deep Field is. Anyhow, that's an aside . And And when when Hubble, you know, they they put all the images together, stacked them all up, in this apparently empty patch of sky, Hubble saw thousands of galaxies, right, stretching back over a significant portion of cosmic history. So then a few years later, they did it again with the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, and this time it was in the southern hemisphere constellation of Fornax. Slightly bigger patch of sky and 10,000 galaxies in this patch of sky. And it's a very small patch of sky. Just for a little bit of perspective, if you hold your pinky finger out at arm's length and you you hold it up to the sky, your pinky you will look really weird, right? But that patch of sky that the end of your pinky is covering is the equivalent to about twenty-five her bal ultra deep fields. That's map. So it's a really small patch. of sky That's so mad. Te it is mad, isn't it? Like ten thousand galaxies, right? And like so we we've heard of like the herbal deep fields, but the herbal deep fields are not the only deep fields out there. There's there's loads of them. And one of the most studied, but actually not talked about so much, is one called the Cosmos Field. And it's in the constellation of Saxons. And the Cosmos field spans about two square degrees of sky, so it's about ten full moons all put together. Yeah, it's like a big patch of sky. And there's about two million galaxies which are known about and studied in this patch and it has been looked at by pretty much every telescope that you can think of: ground-based, space-based. They will turn their telescopes at some point to the cosmos field. And that means it's really rich in what we call multi-spectral data. So data at many wavelengths, spanning basically like ultraviolet all the way through to the radio, like all of that part of the electromagnetic spectrum. And that means it is perfect for diagnostics. So when you're looking at galaxies you want to figure out things like their mass and their star formation rate and how far away they are. This allows you to categorize them and understand the evolution of galaxies over time. And I like this field because this was the field I studied in my PhD. So close to my heart as well, this. Yeah, yeah. And so you do this by you have your photometry, all your different wavelengths, you've got all your different data points, you fit your models, and you best fitted model then will give you the information like mass and star formation rate and distance and so on. And of course, the more data points you got, the more accurate your results. Now, the Cosmos web portion of the Cosmos field covers about three full moons. So it's like the central portion. And this was done with near cam and then there's a much smaller area that's um covered by Miri. But the Neocam portion has got about a hundred and sixty thousand galaxies in it going right back to a few hundred million years after the big bang. So it's basically when we first start getting galaxies. And what is so important about the Cosmos web data is that it has mapped these galaxies in unprecedented detail. We are talking distances accurate to much less than one percent in many cases. And for galaxies that are that far away, we're talking, you know, 13.4 billion years ago, it is unprecedented. And it has resulted in the most detailed map of the cosmic web ever. Yes. Because it's the the distances to them are extraordinary. Because you've got all of this multi-wavelength data, you can do really accurate photometric redshifts. You don't need the spectral data because all of this multi-wavelength data is essentially like having a a coarse spectrum. So it's just it's absolutely extraordinary. So the cosmic web is this kind of underlying network within throughout the universe. It's it's sheets and filaments of dark matter and gas that they interconnect at what we call nodes and then in between them then are these enormous voids and at the nodes is where you find galaxies and galaxy clusters and things like that and then the voids are largely devoid of galaxies not not completely, but largely devoid and then you've got more material al along the the filaments and and so on. And these they grew the the nodes and the voids grew from those density fluctuations from from the big bang . And what we now have proof of from JWST is not just that the cosmic web is this kind of like skelet on that the universe kind of grew around, but actually it dictates galaxy evolution. Right. So it's not just passive, it's active in the evolution of the universe. Yeah. So w because they've got so many galaxies now really accurately mapped in terms of their mass and their cell formation rate and their distance, they've been able to kind of look at well how how are galaxies behaving in the cosmic web at different epochs. And so what they found is that in the early universe, so the first couple billion years, the cosmic web was actually feeding galaxies and helping them grow. And the evidence there is from these extra dense protoclusters where galaxies are really rapidly forming stars because the cosmic web is feeding all this gas in, dark matter's pooling, which is helping gas clump to form stars. So the first couple of billion years, yeah, the cosmic web is great. It's like helping the universe grow. But and then all of like the the galaxy growth is regulated by what they call internal feedback mechanisms. So it's like jet some supermassive black holes in the heart of galaxies, like heating up gas and ejecting it, pushing it away and stopping gas from accreting onto galaxies, uh exploding stars, so like supernovae doing similar sort of things, um, and also just galaxies being really efficient and just burning through all of their gas, right? But then there's like this transition period which peaks at around about 10 billion years, um, and after from about seven and a half billion years ago through to the present day, actually all of the nodes where the cosmic web is like the densest, it's killing galaxies. Wow. And that is because all of the gas in these nodes has now been heated over the billions of years. So instead of falling into galaxies to then form stars, it is actually ripping the gas out of galaxies as they're moving through all of this hot medium. Wow. Galaxy mergers are now destructive instead of triggering star formation. The tidal interactions are ripping galaxies apart is completely changed our view of the cosmic web. So it it isn't just this scaffold anymore, it is actively dictating how galaxies evolve. Wow. So that's my news. It's cool, isn't it? That is cool. And rather scary now. Yeah, because like we live in a dying universe. Yeah. And like w this was like part of part of my PhD was like, why was the the universe the best at forming stars 10 billion years ago. It was this huge question because you you can trace it back, and there is this peak ten billion years ago. The like galaxies were brilliant at forming stars. And this is part of the answer, is it's because actually the cosmic web is so much more than a scaffold and it actually performs differently at different epochs. But yeah, so it's it's it's just incredible. This because JWC has enabled this really accurate mapping, completely changed our view. That's amazing. That's amazing. Mm. Oh, and uh temperature update. Oh yeah, temperature update. Go. We're now at twenty-nine degrees. You're getting hotter and hotter. Damn your hot I was gonna say how I can't help it, darling. Yeah. Oh god. So for me is the probable answer those odd galaxies that seem to defy cosmology. You remember? The extreme red shift objects that JDLST discovered. Ones that seem to have a shift of thirty two and an age of ninety million years after Big Bang. Those is it those those little red dots? Those little red dots. Little red dots? Yeah, little red dots. The ones that Well they just aren't supposed to be there, frankly., is what we were saying this We were saying this months and months ago. These aren't supposed to be here. What are they doing here? What is this about? Well it turns out they probably aren't there. Well not there anyway, they are somewhere, and crucially, they aren't what astronomers thought. So buckle up kiddos. Let me explain. Hello. Yeah, it's good this is So a team led by astronomer Marusa Braddock thought they had found more of these weird cosmological vandals . Looking at the bullet cluster survey imaging. So JVS looked at the bullet cluster, very interesting cluster. They were looking for these cosmic dawn progenitors, as those kind of people had been talking about these ultra high redshift galaxies from way back at sort of Z equals twenty in terms of redshift and more. For context, Z equals 14 was considered pretty way out back in the dark days of like twenty twenty four. So you know thirty two, everyone's going like, what the hell? This is just this is getting nuts. Well they found two things. They found two objects. Two incredibly compelling bright spots points of light that completely dropped out of the shorter wavelength filters, but shone brightly in the F277W and F356W bands, which is the sort of classic textbook signatures of these galaxies that we've been picking up and drink of cosmic history. This is this was like, oh yeah, here we go. But, and it is a massive, does my bomb look big in this butt? Okay . Because when you find candidates that exciting, when you look for it and you go, Oh, there they are, look at that, exactly what we're looking for. You don't just point and guess, you get your spectrograph out, and you have a darn good look. And they turned J Dorothy's powerhouse. We've already talked about a near spec instrument onto these two galaxies to capture the chemical fingerprints. And instead of the pristine primordial hydrogen lines of the early universe, they found methane and water vapor. And ammonia . So Yeah , but they don't exist in the early all very odd and frankly a little suspicious. Hmm. Well, they took another image exactly one year later. Yeah. And guess what? What? Proper motion. Oh they nearby. These two extreme distance highly red shifted galaxies with the very suspicious chemical figure prints moved. They moved! They moved. They moved against the background stars and galaxies in the image. One moved by forty nine milliarconds and the other by twenty four. Actually like just significantly moved. Oh my god! So they're literally at the opposite end of the universe. Yep. They gone and they're actually like Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They weren't looking at giant systems with billions of stars at the edge of the universe at all. They were looking at two ultra cool white dwarfs right at our own Milky Way. About So I so white dwarfs, are they the ones that are like on the brink between Yeah, exactly. So these are about one thousand six hundred light years away, how did this happen? Well it turns out it's all to do with a thing called the Lyman Alpha Break. Yeah. Now in distant galaxy spectra, there's a sudden break in the light curve. It kinda changes. You look at it, it's like a big drop, it's like a cliff. Yeah. And you when you sort of record it, and it turns out these white dwar f, brown dwarf, if you like, mimic it pretty precisely. Oh my god. Their light spectra has a this curve, and the drop-off, this this it's literally like you put the two next to each other, they look almost identical. Oh . And it's because it turns out it's uh specific wavelengths of light are absorbed by the various constituents in their their atmospheres. Holy smokes. And it makes the curve look exactly like a very distant red shifted galaxy . I know. So that's wild. It is amazing. So the big news here is that these cos cosmology breaking galaxies are probably I mean this is just looking at these two objects, but it kinda suggests that actually this might be the answer that everyone's looking for. They're probably ultra cool brown dwarfs. Failed stars that never got massive enough to ignite nuclear fusion. And when they say ultra cool, they really mean it. One of these things is an effective temperature of just three hundred and fifty Kelvin. You could literally stand on it. Hang on. Yeah. I was going to say three hundred and fifty Kelvin. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's basically a hot cup of tea. Oh no, so it's basically where I am now in Wales. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It it it feels like here now. Yeah, exactly. But it's it's like a hot cup a hot cup of tea. Spectroscopically confirmed as well. I know. That's pretty cool. So it's really cool. It's like it's cool in many, many ways. It really shows you how deceptive the universe can be, though. It's a fantastic discovery for a brown dwarf science, but I imagine it's a bit of a wake-up call for cos mologists, bit of a shot across the bowel there. Are they gonna have to go back and check other things? Because the paper actually warns that as we do these deeper surveys, especially if we look closer to the plane in the Milky W ay, these ultra cool wide dwarfs are going to constantly basically photobomb and pretend to be high redshift galaxies. So the authors these galaxies are so far away that they are just points of light, like there's no structure to them. No no no exactly. So the authors calculated a density of about naught point one four of these sneaky little impostors per square arc minute . My god. There's a lot of that's Yeah. Yeah. So suddenly a load of those little red dots everywhere that you see in various deep field images could actually just be brown dwarfs . Yeah. Very great. Great for people who are studying like the transition between giant planets and stars. I mean these these white dwarfs they they reckon they're they're similar in actual physical size to Jupiter. They're not actually dissimilar in size to Jupiter itself, just just more massive. Yeah. They're just they're just a lot more massive. Like denser. Yeah, a lot lot dense, but but not s radically bigger than Jupiter itself. So yeah, I mean, how bonkers is that? That's a great story. And goes to show the objects in the golden mirror can be closer than they appear. Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. I like that a lot. Yeah. It's good in there. I like I like that. But yeah. Yeah. I made that up. That is actually a me one that. That is a new one. I like that. That's a me one. That's not even stone from the internet. You could get a little little picture and actually like you know, put that on the on the JWST mirror as like the little thing from the I'm saying that I made it up. I bet you now actually it already exists on the internet and it's just like one of those you know, you see it and then you forget it exists and then it just worms into your brain and you're like people can be writing in and be like, no, actually it was coined by someone in like two thousand and one. Yeah. But but that's a great story. Isn't it? Isn't it? I just I I I saw that and I thought that's bonkers. That's really bonkers. People were really starting to ex plode about this Yeah. Distant galaxy thing. And this is how yeah, it's so important to get spectra. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And to revisit objects and and this is the perfect illustrator for that. Yeah. And taking that second image a year later and then seeing the proper motion and going, Oh sh these things are actually they've they've literally gone from the edge of the known universe to just down the road. Like the meme I've got in my you know there's that meme where you've got like the three different spidermans like all pointing at each other. This is what I've got in my brain now. And it's just like JWST scientists just like all pointing at these red dots which you' pointreing back at them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely. Completely. How mad is that? That's this bunker. It's a brilliant story. So they I mean th this has all now got to be applied to these these things. Actually as a sign. That's what they say in the paper is there's actually like I think we need to go back and revisit all these all these previous kind of things people were pointing to over the last couple of years 'cause they could just be brown dwarfs. Yeah, hundred percent. They're gonna have to double check. I mean the ones I think that have got spectra already, at least all they need to do is like double check the spectra because it th there should be signals there that would like reveal. But there will be some that aren't, but there's a lot of them that Yeah, that there could be a lot of them. That are bimbly brown doors. That are just bimbling around the Milky Way. Photo bombing JWST. Yeah. Like, oh lads, lads, they're looking for a galaxy. It's like, oh go on, Jeff, go, go on. Go on, go on, D,ave Dave, Dave , just just just like move in. They're all like like woo look at me, I'm a galaxy. No, no, no, no, my spectra looks just like yours. It looks just like a live and alpha break. Because of my methane and ammonia and water vapor. That's good. Yeah, it's good in it. Right, what's what have you what have you gonna gonna f you're not a JWST now? No. Different acronym for you. ESA . Oh ESA's alright. I like ESA. ESA . Yeah. So this is actually um it's a mission that launched on the 19th of May. So there's no science or anything yet. Um because it's gonna take about a month in total to get into its science orbit, which is really interesting. We'll come on to that. But it's actually a collaboration between China and ESA. It's the first time that they've collaborated on a mission from end to end and we'll continue to collaborate There's been some collaboration and the China's used a lot of ESA's deep space field for the like dishes for communication with their missions and things like that. Yeah. Yeah, so they've absolutely collaborated before, but this is the first time it's like an end-to-end mission. Okay. And this mission is um called Smile which is cute. Nice. Um and this is all about it's like a wide field Earth sun study. It's all about studying our magnetosphere and the aurora at the same time to really get a complete view of how our planet in real time responds to the solar wind and solar storms. Ooh, now that'll be it. Right? It's cool, isn't it? So the solar wind, for anyone who's not sure, is this continuous stream of charged particles, so electrons and protons mostly, that emanates from the sun. And it's constantly battering our magnetic fields. And then sometimes the sun has these solar storms, so sometimes there's these quick bursts of material, coronal mass ejections, where you can get like a billion tons of solar material like thrown in our direction. Yeah, yeah. And that's when we get when that material then arrives at our magnetosphere, because it's charged particles, they get caught up in the magnetic field and the magnetic field tangled within them from the sun interacts with ours and they get funneled down into our atmosphere They excite the atoms and molecules in our atmosphere, which then relax, and then that's they give off the excess energy in the form of light which is the aurora, and that is your kind of one sentence explanation of what the aurora is. But the thing is we don't really understand the connection between the atmosphere, the magnetosphere and the sun. Like because there's been loads of missions of like looked at each element individually, but like not at the same time. Yeah. So this is what Smile is all about. There's an X-ray camera on board, and that's gonna monitor the magnetosphere. Yep, cool. And it's gonna reveal when and where and how the solar wind interacts with the upper portions of our magnetosphere. And these X-rays actually come from the the particles of the solar wind interacting with our like the really tenuous upper atmosphere of Earth, like really , like really far out, super tenuous, you know, like not anything that we would call an atmosphere, but there's still molecules and atoms out there, and that's what it's interacting with to generate these X-rays . So you can imagine that there's like an X-ray camera pointing in one angle, looking at the magnetosphere, the the bit that's the closest to the sun, the sun facing side. Then pointing in a different angle at the same time is an ultraviolet camera monitoring Earth's north pole at the auroral oval. Yeah yeah yeah yeah and it's ultraviolet to see the aurora in the day and the night side. So instead of it instead of it being visible. And so then you get data. So when you see the magnetosphere sort of reacting to the solar wind, you get immediate data at the same time of how the aurora is changing. So is it brightening? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Where is it brightening? Is there a delayed reaction? Because we we don't know, like we're not a hundred percent sure how long everything takes. And there's also like a magnetometer on boards to measure the solar wind and and and things like that. Very cool. And it's gonna look at magnetic reconnection too on like the far side where you get the the stretched out magnetic fields where like our magnetic fields being buffered out by the solar wind and you get those magnetic fields like s lines snapping back together. That generates Aurora too. And to do this, it's the orbit is amazing. So it's it's gonna orbit over the poles. Mm-hmm. And it's closest over the South Pole. It'll be about five thousand kilometers above the surface of the earth. And then over the north pole , it's about 1 2 1,000 kilometers high. And that means it can hover basically and look at the north pole of of Earth for about two days, almost two days continuously. And then it and then like zips back down and then it does this really you know slow arc over the top and zips back down. And so that's why it's gonna take like a month for it to get into its orbit. Yeah. Because it's gotta like keep keep tilting itself and tilting itself and tilting itself. Um and then it initial mission is three years and you know you know what it's like. Then see how it goes. Yeah, very cool. I like that mission. Mmm. So yeah, it's one to kind of watch for. I'm interested to see what comes out of that. That'd be really interesting. Mm-mm. Very cool. Well, it's time for our sky guide and June brings the summer solstice short fleeting nights and persistent astronomical twilight. Yeah, I'd pack it in and have a break if I was you to be honest, it's it's go to the southern hemisphere. It's winter there, and they got long nights. Exactly, but there is treasure in them, there are hills, if you're going to insist . So, Venus Jupiter conjunction. So we did we did actually flag this up last month, so it's so such a good one. I love a Venus Jupiter conjunction. It always really good. So , best view on the 8th and 9th, Venus Jupiter conjunction. This is the absolute musty planetary event of the summer, frankly. Jupiter and Venus are stunning on their own. They will form an incredibly tight, dazzling pair in the Tilwight sky. They will be positioned just below the famous twin stars, Castor and Pollux in Gemini. Assuming you have a clear unobstructed southwestern horizon, they'll be impossible to miss. They'll hang roughly one finger's width apart . Um really close. Really close. That's holding your finger out at arms in, not the right in front of your face. Yeah. Standard pair of 10x50s will frame both planets together beautifully, and you might even pick out a few of Jupiter's Galilean moons right next to brilliant Venus. Good wide field eyepiece, may just squeeze them in, and even if you can't, it is the tiniest nudge to move between them. So it's really cool. It's gonna be cracking and it's gonna be really like nice pictures. If you can get like a nice foreground, you can get some lovely pictures. And you're gonna get that like it is now. I mean look, it's like you know, it's ten o'clock. It's only a few days' time this, and you've got like this sort of lovely pink horizon , beautiful, darkening blue sky, that really gorgeous sky. Yeah, it's gonna be picturesque. And then you're gonna have that du o beautiful white gems just sitting there. It's just gonna be gorgeous. You just like more do you want for a summer gin sitting there having a kicking back . But that's not the only planetary action, right? No . Because we have got Mercury reaching greatest eastern elongation, so twenty-four degrees from the sun, on the fifteenth. That is your best evening apparition for Mercury like this year for the UK. Like that this is the one. If you want to try and catch Mercury, very few people have knowingly observed Mercury. Yeah, they reckon one percent. One percent of the world have knowingly seen Mercury. Yeah. And got the and and and got it right and known known what they were seeing. Yeah, and the thing is once you know where to look, like, it is obvious. It is a lot fainter than Venus, but you can pick it out with a naked e s milk queue But. But I' otherwise you you just sort of don't notice it. It's just you if you're not looking for it, it it's just you completely pass it over. Yeah. And especially because Twilight in June it it lingers so it it it can kind of be lost in this. Yeah. Um so wait three quarters of an hour after sunset , look to the west-northwest, sweep it with binoculars, and you'll see a faint solitary warm coloured star sitting beneath the fading sunset colours, and that will be Mercury. Yeah. Yeah. And it's it's further north, and you always think that's always have to remember how far north the sunset is. It's really easy to get like you know, you think, oh, the sunset's in the west, and actually no, you've got to like turn much further towards the north to to get these objects. I was noticed that with Venus the other night, I was I was out sort of doing something, and there's like oh god, Venus is all the way over there now because just of where the sunset is. It's way over towards the north now. Right, full body problem because following on from that, mid-June gives astrophotographers and persistent visual observers if you if you you know want to sit there and take your time a gorgeous composition. Just nice little you know flag this up on the evenings of June the sixteenth and seventeenth, razor thin waxing crescent moon will gracefully glide past the sort of planetary parade. Or are we gonna use that term planetary parade? Well it is a parade of planets in this case, isn't it? Because you've got you know looking west about ten o'clock BST, you'll be able to see the delicate sliver of the moon suspended near Mercury, with Jupiter just slightly to the left, blazing Venus anchoring the trio just above them. It's perfect target for a wide angle DSLR sit there, click, boom, get your nice big picture, or for relaxing in a chair with the binos and a gin. Make sure you've got a nice clear western horizon. Basically you'll have three planets and the moon. Yeah. You know that if you get a gorgeous sky like it is now, oh my god, that's just gonna look so cool. Yeah, it'd be like shortner. Beautiful blue sky, red red horizon, three planets, sliver of the moon. Ha! What more could you want for the summer? Yeah. So of course though the nights are gonna get longer 'cause although we're bemoaning the thing, it is actually not the object pointed telescope app, but it is the solstice on the twenty first of June, which marks the astronomical turning point of our year. Yes, it is. At exactly zero nine twenty four BST, the northern hemisphere reaches its maximum tilt toward the sun, giving the UK roughly sixteen and a half hours of daylight, which always is still like Mindboggling. I've lived here my entire life and that still blows my mind that we get day you know a day that is like sixteen and a half hours of daylight. Two thirds of the day is daylight. Yeah, and and for for people who live further south, which is all of like the US and things like that, I think it does show I I actually saw a little YouTube clip jumped up of someone who an American had moved here and he said he just like was he'd been prepared for it but just could not believe how how early it was or how light it was so early and actually thought he'd missed work and overslept because it was completely daylight at like four thirty in the morning. Yeah. And it's like, no, no, that's just life. That's just life. That's just, you know, you're gonna wake up at four o'clock in the morning because it's daylight. Um and so yeah, so for deep sky sky observers, this is the official start of the countdown. Yeah. As the nights slowly begin to lengthen again and we get back to get back to Dark Sky. So you know it's almost there, people. It's almost there, we've just got to keep pushing. But yeah, twenty first of June. Yeah. I'm afraid. So you've got a while to wait. And then the final thing to look out for is the da da da Noctalocent Cloud s. They're back, baby. Yeah. Now 2025 was actually a great year for Noctolucent Clouds. And research has suggested that um they were enhanced by large-scale planetary waves. So these are enormous atmospheric waves which which work their way around our planet. And they're generated by the heat differentials between the poles and the equator, um air currents, things like that. And they think that last year they helped cool the mesosphere, so about 80 kilometers up. Theyh enance moisture transportation. So they just basically created the perfect environment for these ice crystals to form, which is what noctilucent clouds are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Noctilucent translators as night shining. And they are these like bright white electric blue clouds that kind of look like lace across the sky and you can tell that they're not solution clouds not normal clouds because as the sun keeps setting the sky gets darker, these get brighter, but normal clouds start getting darker and darker. Yeah. And that's how you can tell. So you want to look to the west about half an hour after sunset is when they can first start appearing. And yeah, just look for it's they' kindre of describe it as like electrified lace and they can appear just like low to the horizon right across like half the sky. Uh it just depends. Yeah. And it's it's ice crystals in the mesosphere so they they form around contaminants like dust from meteors, in the atmosphere, meteoroids, pollution, could be human-made pollution. And then it's as the sun keeps dropping below the horizon, even though we can't see the light anymore, the light can still illuminate high up in the atmosphere, and so that's why they appear so bright. So worth looking out for cool. Right, so for our deep sky segment, we're pointing our optics down into the murky soup of the southern horizon at midnight. In the UK, the magnificent constellation of Scorpius, which never fully rises here, is curling sort of stinger remains hidden below the ground, but its bright head and heart popped right along on our southern skyline. Very much overlooked constellation, people rarely look at it because of how low it is. So despite the low altitude and the twilight, Scorpius holds some iconic targets as a bright enough to cut through the summer haze. So Antares , Alpha Scorpio, Super Red Giant, and the fiery distinctive orange heart of the scorpion. Visual magnitude of plus one, make it easy spot for the naked eye even in the twilight. Then we have one of the biggest and brightest globs in the form of Messier 4, sitting just 1.3 degrees above Antares . It's one of the closest globular clusters to Earth in binoculars or a small scope, it looks like a glowing fuzzy ball of cosmic fluff in the thicker, lower at the sort of lower sky. If you're very used to seeing those sort of sharp, pin sharp uh globular clusters higher in the sky like M thirteen then this one probably is not going to appear as as sharp but it is bigger and brighter is actually a very very big bright um globular and and if you're in a lower latitude, it's it's a beautiful object. But in the UK, actually it's slightly spoiled by sweat, but it's definitely there, it's definitely worth tracking down. Then rising a little after the last two is Messier 6, the butterfly cluster. An open cluster is one of the most stunning in the Messier catalogue and looks like an open set of wings of a butterfly. Again , one to see if you can go to a lower latitude, you'll get an even better view. Because Scorpius stays so low for UK observers, it rarely climbs more than 10-12 degrees high, atmospheric extinction will dim these objects, so find an observing spot on a hill with a completely uninterrupted view to the south, and wait for a night with exceptional atmospheric transparency to help you. And then it's on to our lunar guide. Dun dun dun. Day nineteen. I can't believe we get we we're getting towards the end of this. We're getting such a good segment though. Yeah we're getting right such a good suggestion. So day nineteen, the moon the moon is now definitely past full. Okay the terminator is beginning to visibly encroach on the eastern limb even without the aid of inoculars. And the result is casting long shadows over the great lava plains . So Mari Crisum, the Sea of Crisis, the isolated dark basaltic plain that sits near the edge of the moon is definitely worth a look at this lighting angle. On day nineteen the low grazing sunlight highlights the wrinkled ridges or dorsa, which are snake-like across its floor, as well as the steep dramatic cliffs that form its basin wall. Then you've got the stunning craters Langrin us and Petavus, and they're located further south along the Terminator with Langrinus featuring complex slopped terraces on its inner walls and a bright central peak. My Petavis is a favourite from amateur astronomers because of its massive size and a prominent deep fracture rimmer that cuts all the way from its central mountain peak to its outer rim. I love this crater. I have drawn it many, many times and I d absolutely love that rim of those it's just it's just really cool. It's just a big yeah like dark line that sort of shatters the crater. It's really cool. So on day twenty the termin ator pushes further across the lumen disk. It cuts through the heavily cratered southern highlands on the edges of the larger mare . Mare Fencundit us I love that one. See a fertility. It's a good word, isn't it? It is look closely at the surface of this plane for the Messier crater pair, Messier and Messier A two small fascinating craters created by sort of highly oblique low angle asteroid impact. This unique impact blasted out a distinct double rayed so the double railed sorry ray system of bright ejector looks like a cobit's tail streaking across the dark lava plane. So looking out for that's a good way of it. It is cool. It is it is. Then you have a great example of a ghost crater Fre castori us now this is located at the southern margin of the Mare Nectaris Sea of Nectar. This is a classic ghost crater where billions of years ago lava spilled over from the sea and completely breached the crater's northern wall, filling its interior. So you get this sort of flat kind of it's a circle and it's a crater but. it it''ss flat Because a ghost crater. So on day twenty the low sun angle beautifully illuminates the remaining horseshoe shaped rim that's left. You can really see it. And actually once it gets behind you, it's much more difficult to see. So on day twenty-one, the moon reaches last quarter . So the turbul cuts directly down the centre of the lunar disc, offering some of the most jaw-dropping three-dimensional views of the entire lunar cycle. One of my favourites, the Theophilious Trio is the musty target here. This is the spectacular north south chain of three massive overlapping craters Theophilious, Cerillius and Catharina. Because they overlap, they provide a sort of visual timeline of lunar history. Theophilus is the youngest and sharpest, featuring massive terraced walls, sharp central mountain peak, that be catching the first rays of sunlight while its floor is plunged into shadow. Katarina is the oldest, its walls heavily eroded and battered by all the subsequent impacts that came afterwards. So you can see this big difference. Beautiful object to draw if you've you it takes ages to draw all three, but it's well worth the effort. And also look out for the rupees Alte, the Alte Scarp. This is a colossal mountain cliff face that forms part of the ancient outer rings of the Mare Nectaris impact bas in. So on day twenty one the scarp casts a massive sweeping shadow across the landscape, look looking like a sort of jagged lightning bolt cut into the lunar surface. It's really cool. So as a last point here, as we're into the morning for the best views, the air is often calmer and more stable just before sunrise of course. So the views of these craters can be incredibly sharp and steady compared to the turbulent air of early evening. So if you're wondering whether it's worth getting up for or staying up for, then yes, images will be sharper, observation more detail. So it's definitely worth doing lots of people just don't bother with the moon in the morning. It's you know you do you do that whole like up until fall and then you go, alright, well I've seen it all. I'm not going to bother with it going back the other way. Actually you often get better views in the morning. Interesting. Definitely worth doing. And so then your moon for this month, so you know when to look out for these features. The moon begins just past full, it's last quarter on the 8th, new on the 15th, first quarter on the 22nd, and then full on the 30th. So then all that remains is to wish you clean Some say hell is a place of our own making. Others say it's just off junction 13 and 14 of the M1. I say it's having to listen to 18-year-old reform councillor Kieran Leigh demanding that Doncaster City Council investigate UFOs because NASA said so. Oh. Truly we live in an idiocracy. Perhaps it is hell of our own making. Certainly feels hot enough. Stay in touch, etc . Email or flag us down on the King's Highway. Put a message in one of our numerous dead drops. The show at awesomeastronomy.com. So until our mid month talk and then wittering and waffle, it's goodbye from Sidonia B ase. Bye bye . Awesome Astronomy is produced by Ralph, Paul, Jen, John, Damien, and Dust in and is free to use with attribution. Theme music by Star Solzman with stinger variation by Rin Jorgensen . We promote general science, astronomy, space exploration , and rational thinking with more resources on our website at awesomeastronomy.com . If you want us to read your thoughts and comments out on the show, send us your views, opinions, critiques, or questions to the show at awesomeastronomy.com. Tweet us at AwesomeAstropod or give the AwesomeAstronomy Facebook page a like and leave your comments there. Thanks for listening from Cydonia Base , End of Transmission