May 26
The Lion's Tail
Sun Position
The Sun is in Gemini at about +21.3° declination. In the Northern Hemisphere, late May evenings offer the year's best balance of warmth and dark sky before June's twilight overwhelms northern observing. Southern observers have clear, long nights.
Sky Highlight
Leo is now well past the meridian by 9 PM and setting in the west, carrying the spring galaxy season with it. Denebola, the tail star, marks the Lion's rear and points loosely toward the Virgo Cluster to its east. This is a good week to sweep Leo and Virgo with binoculars before Leo descends into the evening twilight.
Deep Sky Object
M65 and M66 (NGC 3623 and NGC 3627), the Leo Triplet pair, about 35 million light-years away. Two bright spiral galaxies that fit within a single low-power field of view, with a third (NGC 3628) just to the north. Both show spiral structure in small telescopes. Good altitude for northern and equatorial observers in May evenings.
Featured Star
Denebola (β Leonis) is a main-sequence A-type star 35.9 light-years away, spectral class A3Va. Infrared observations show it is surrounded by a disk of warm dust and debris (a candidate protoplanetary disk or remnant disk) making it one of the nearer stars with evidence of material potentially forming or once forming planets. Its name means 'the lion's tail' in Arabic.
Around This Date
- May 26, 1951Sally Ride was born; she would become the first American woman in space, flying aboard STS-7 in 1983, and later a prominent advocate for science education.
- May 28, 1959Able and Miss Baker became the first animals successfully recovered from spaceflight, returning from a suborbital trajectory aboard a Jupiter rocket.
Debris around a nearby star: something was building, or something burned down.