July 9
The Eagle Lands
Sun Position
The Sun is in Cancer at roughly +21.7° declination. Northern midsummer continues; Southern Hemisphere observers enjoy long winter nights as Aquila rises later in the east.
Sky Highlight
No named meteor shower peaks on July 9. The Summer Triangle (Vega, Deneb, and Altair) is now fully above the horizon in the Northern Hemisphere for most of the night, rising in the east at dusk. From the Southern Hemisphere, the triangle is visible as the 'Winter Triangle,' climbing in the northeast during evening hours.
Deep Sky Object
M11 (NGC 6705), the Wild Duck Cluster, an open cluster in Scutum roughly 6,200 light-years away. It is one of the richest open clusters known, containing around 2,900 stars in a fan-shaped arrangement that gave rise to its common name. Visible in binoculars and spectacular in a small telescope; well-placed for both hemispheres on July evenings.
Featured Star
Altair (α Aql) is a main-sequence A-type star just 16.73 light-years away in Aquila, classified A7V. It rotates so fast (completing a full rotation in under nine hours) that it is measurably oblate: wider at the equator than the poles. At this distance, the light you see left during the early years of the space age.
Around This Date
- July 9, 1979Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Jupiter, confirming the Galilean moons' complex orbital dynamics and returning detailed imagery of Europa's icy, fractured surface.
- July 11, 1979Skylab, the first United States space station, reentered Earth's atmosphere and broke apart, with debris falling across Western Australia, a widely watched end to the first American orbital laboratory.
Sixteen light-years is cosmically close, but Altair fills that space with a star spinning so fast its own equator bulges outward.