June 27
The Coptic Claw
Sun Position
The Sun is in Cancer, declination near +23.1°. Northern days are shortening gradually; Virgo sets earlier each evening as the year turns toward autumn.
Sky Highlight
The June Bootids are a variable, unpredictable meteor shower that occasionally produces brief outbursts near this date; the shower's radiant is in Boötes, and meteors are unusually slow. Most years produce only a few per hour, but in 1998 and 2004 brief storms occurred. Worth watching the northern sky after dark.
Deep Sky Object
M53 (NGC 5024), a globular cluster about 58,000 light-years away. M53 in Coma Berenices is one of the more remote globular clusters in the Messier catalog, sitting well above the galactic plane; it is accompanied by a fainter and more loosely scattered globular, NGC 5053, visible in the same wide-field view. Well-placed in June from the Northern Hemisphere; accessible from southern latitudes earlier in the evening.
Featured Star
Khambalia (λ Vir) is a matched white main-sequence pair (A1V + A2V) about 187 light-years away; its name comes from the Coptic astronomical tradition and means 'crooked claw,' making it one of the very few stars with a name traceable to ancient Egyptian star catalogs. Two white stars at the same distance carrying a name older than Islam.
Around This Date
- June 27, 1995Space Shuttle Atlantis successfully docked with the Russian space station Mir for the first time, beginning the Shuttle-Mir program.
- June 29, 1995The joint US-Russian crew transferred between Atlantis and Mir, exchanging scientific equipment and demonstrating that the two nations' spacecraft could operate cooperatively.
Coptic astronomers named this star's crooked claw and the name has outlasted their language, their empire, and most of what they knew.