July 14
Bastille Day and the Eagle
Sun Position
The Sun is in Cancer at about +20.2° declination. Northern Hemisphere summer days are warm and still long; Southern Hemisphere midwinter nights are excellent for deep-sky work.
Sky Highlight
No named meteor shower peaks on July 14. Aquila, home to Altair, is prominent in the eastern sky after dark for Northern Hemisphere observers and well up in the northeast for Southern Hemisphere mid-latitudes. The Summer Triangle (Vega, Deneb, and Altair) is now a fixture of the evening sky in the Northern Hemisphere.
Deep Sky Object
NGC 6709, an open cluster in Aquila roughly 3,000 light-years away. It contains about 40 stars and is best seen in binoculars or a wide-field telescope. Less well-known than Messier clusters in Scorpius and Sagittarius, it offers a rewarding target in the same part of the sky as Altair. Visible from both hemispheres.
Featured Star
Altair (α Aql) lies just 16.73 light-years away in Aquila, a main-sequence A-type star classified A7V. Its rotation rate of roughly 286 km/s at the equator (compared to the Sun's 2 km/s) makes it one of the fastest rotating naked-eye stars, and direct interferometric imaging has confirmed its oblate disk shape.
Around This Date
- July 14, 1965Mariner 4 completed the first successful flyby of Mars, returning 21 photographs that revealed a cold, cratered surface and an atmosphere far thinner than scientists had hoped.
- July 14, 2015NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto, returning the first detailed images of the dwarf planet and its moon Charon after a nine-year, three-billion-mile journey.
Altair is close enough to visit in imagination and far enough to remind you that even the nearest stars are not quite neighbors.