May 15
The Crooked Claw
Sun Position
The Sun is in Taurus at about +19.2° declination. Mid-May is one of the pleasantest times for evening observing at northern mid-latitudes: the air is warm but twilight is still short enough to allow a good dark window. Southern skies are darkening earlier each night.
Sky Highlight
The last traces of the Eta Aquariid meteor shower linger through mid-May. Any fast, persistent-train meteor in the pre-dawn southeast is likely a late Aquariid straggler. The shower formally closes around May 28, though rates drop steeply after the peak week.
Deep Sky Object
M61 (NGC 4303), barred spiral galaxy in Virgo, about 52 million light-years away. One of the larger spiral galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, with distinct spiral arms visible in photographs. It also has an unusually high supernova rate, six supernovae have been detected in it since 1926. Southern and equatorial observers have the best altitude.
Featured Star
Khambalia (λ Virginis) is a white main-sequence pair 187 light-years away, spectral class A1V + A2V. Its name is Coptic in origin, derived from a phrase meaning 'crooked claw,' and it is one of only a handful of modern IAU star names that trace to ancient Egyptian rather than Arabic or Greek sources, a quiet reminder that Mediterranean astronomy had many tributaries.
Around This Date
- May 15, 1963Gordon Cooper, aboard Faith 7, completed the last Mercury program mission after 22 orbits, manually guiding the capsule to a splashdown after instrument failures, demonstrating that astronauts could fly spacecraft without full automation.
- May 16, 1960Theodore Maiman demonstrated the first working laser at Hughes Research Laboratories, using a synthetic ruby crystal, a technology that would later transform astronomical measurement including lunar ranging and interferometry.
Coptic, Arabic, Greek: the sky is a library in languages that no longer have native speakers.