[Energetic music]
[Chelsea Gohd] What's Up for August
Jupiter and Venus have a morning meetup,
we check out this year's Perseid meteor shower,
and peek into the future of our own Sun.
Mars is the lone planet
in the early evening sky this month,
visible low in the west
for about an hour after the sky starts to darken.
It's now only about 60% as bright
as it appeared back in May.
Saturn is rising by about 10 pm, and you'll see
it showing up a bit earlier each evening as the month goes on.
You'll find it in the east after dark
with the constellations Cassiopeia and Andromeda.
The Ringed Planet makes its way over
to the western part of the sky by dawn,
where early risers will find it on August mornings.
The real highlight of August is the close
approach of Jupiter and Venus.
They shine brightly
in the east before sunrise throughout the month.
The pair begin the month farther apart,
but quickly approach each other in the sky.
They appear at their closest on the 11th and 12th,
only about a degree apart.
Their rendezvous happens against a backdrop of bright stars
including Orion, Taurus, Gemini, and Sirius.
A slim crescent Moon joins the pair of planets after they
separate again, on the mornings of the 19th and 20th.
One of the best annual meteor showers,
the Perseids,
peaks overnight on August 12th and into the 13th.
Unfortunately, this year the Moon is nearly full
on the peak night,
and its glare will wash out all but the brightest meteors.
While that's not so great for Perseid watchers, the good news
is that another favorite annual meteor shower, the Geminids,
is poised for Moon-free viewing in December.
August is a great time to see one of
the easiest-to-observe nebulas in the sky.
The Dumbbell Nebula, also known as M27,
is high overhead on August nights.
It's a type of nebula called a "planetary nebula."
A nebula is a giant cloud of gas and dust in space,
and planetary nebulas are produced by stars like our Sun
when they become old and nuclear fusion ceases inside them.
They blow off their outer layers,
leaving behind a small, hot remnant called a white dwarf.
The white dwarf produces lots of bright ultraviolet light
that illuminates
the nebula from the inside,
as the expanding shell of gas absorbs
the UV light and re-radiates it as visible light.
The Dumbbell Nebula, nicknamed for its dumbbell-like shape,
appears as a small, faint patch of light
about a quarter of the width of the full moon
in binoculars or a small telescope.
It lies within the Summer Triangle,
a pattern of stars
that's easy to find overhead in the August sky.
You'll find the nebula about a third of the way
between its bright stars Altair and Deneb.
Here's hoping you get a chance to observe this glimpse
into the future that awaits our Sun
about 5 billion years from now.
It's part of a cycle that seeds the galaxy
with the ingredients for new generations
of stars and planets -
perhaps even some not too different from our own.
Here are the phases of the Moon for August.
You can stay up to date on all of NASA's missions
exploring the solar system and beyond at science.nasa.gov.
I'm Chelsea Gohd from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
and that's What's Up for this month.