August 23
Into Virgo's Season
Sun Position
The Sun enters Virgo around August 23, moving from Leo. Its declination is roughly +9°. Northern Hemisphere daylight is shrinking; the autumnal equinox is a month away.
Sky Highlight
Around August 23, the Sun crosses from Leo into Virgo astronomically. This is also the traditional start of Virgo season in the tropical zodiac. The date serves as a useful seasonal marker: summer in the Northern Hemisphere is moving toward its final month, and spring is building in the Southern Hemisphere.
Deep Sky Object
NGC 6992, the Eastern Veil Nebula in Cygnus, is a supernova remnant stretching across several degrees of sky roughly 2,100 light-years away. It is a filamentary arc of hot gas still expanding from a stellar explosion perhaps 10,000 years ago. Under dark skies with an OIII filter, it is one of the most visually complex objects in the summer sky. Best from the Northern Hemisphere.
Featured Star
Altair, the A7V main-sequence star 16.7 light-years away, is directly overhead for observers around 8-9° N latitude on August nights, and its spinning disk shape, oblate by about 20 percent, has been directly imaged using interferometry, making it one of the few stars whose actual surface features have been mapped from Earth.
Around This Date
- August 22, 2003Spitzer Space Telescope launched, and over the following years it would become the primary instrument for studying the infrared sky, detecting even the heat signatures of nearby rocky exoplanets.
- August 25, 1981Voyager 2 swept past Saturn, capturing the planet's rings at unprecedented resolution and providing the data that resolved debates about ring composition and structure.
The Sun quietly crosses into Virgo today, an event that is less dramatic than a solstice but no less real, the sky's calendar ticking over on schedule.