Greetings and Salutations fellow stargazers!
This evening the skies finally cleared up and I was able to get some really good shots of the nearly full waxing gibbous moon with Saturn in the Southeastern sky.
In the first picture you can see little Saturn appearing as a 1st-magnitude star just inside Luna's glare. I say little in a strictly ironic way since it is the farthest "wandering star" visible to the naked eye from the Earth's surface while being the second-largest planet in our solar system with a diameter of 75 thousand miles (120,000 km) -- almost ten times the diameter of Earth. The giant planet's rings (which unfortunately are not visible with the naked eye, or the maximum zoom on my camera) are about 175,000 miles (282,000 km) across -- the length of just over four Earths, but only about 3,200 feet (~1 km) thick. Overall, including the rings, Saturn measures approximately 21 Earth diameters in length.
The second photograph I took at midnight is a wider shot of the southern sky which included the giant planet Jupiter further west.
The final shot shows the nearly full waxing gibbous moon and its features. Luna will be in her full glory tomorrow and will likely be visible in the daytime for a few days in the morning hours. The July full moon is called the Thunder Moon in the Northern Hemisphere because of the frequent thunderstorms in the summer.
Well, I hope y'all enjoyed my photos this evening. I hope to have some new ones up soon. Until next time have a wonderful Dixie day, and keep looking to the night skies, y'all!
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