May 8
The Corner of the Barkers
Sun Position
The Sun is in Taurus at about +17.3° declination. Northern Hemisphere days are growing noticeably longer; twilight lingers well into the evening. Southern days are shortening toward their winter solstice minimum.
Sky Highlight
By the second week of May, the spring Virgo Cluster (the largest nearby concentration of galaxies) rides near the meridian at nightfall from northern mid-latitudes. M87, M84, M86, and dozens of other galaxies are within a single field of view in a wide-angle eyepiece, making this one of the richer areas of the evening sky all month.
Deep Sky Object
M87 (NGC 4486), elliptical galaxy in Virgo, about 53 million light-years away. One of the most massive known galaxies, home to a supermassive black hole whose shadow was imaged by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019. Appears as a bright, featureless oval in backyard telescopes, but its jet of relativistic plasma is detectable in deep photographs. Visible from both hemispheres.
Featured Star
Zavijava (β Virginis) is a main-sequence F-type star just 35.65 light-years away, spectral class F8V, close enough to qualify as a solar neighborhood star and similar enough to the Sun to be called a solar analog. It lies in the part of Virgo once called 'the kennel of the barking stars' in older Arabic star lore.
Around This Date
- May 8, 1654Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat exchanged letters establishing the mathematical foundation of probability theory, a development that would later underpin statistical astronomy.
- May 9, 1962The first successful laser ranging of the Moon was achieved at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, bouncing pulses off the lunar surface and measuring the return time to calculate distance.
A solar twin 36 light-years out: a yellow star in a yellow star's field of view.