May 28
The Beautiful Contrast
Sun Position
The Sun is in Gemini at about +21.5° declination. Northern Hemisphere nights are short (as few as 5–6 hours of true darkness near 50°N) but the quality of those hours in late May is excellent. Southern skies offer long, cold nights for winter observing.
Sky Highlight
Boötes is crossing the meridian at midnight in late May, carrying Arcturus to its highest point of the year. The Boötes Void (an immense nearly empty region of space roughly 250 million light-years away) lies in the direction of the constellation, discovered in 1981 and one of the largest known structures of its kind in the observable universe.
Deep Sky Object
M3 (NGC 5272), globular cluster in Canes Venatici, about 34,000 light-years away. Still near its best placement of the season, M3 is often compared with M13 as a rival for 'finest northern globular.' Its outer halo resolves well into individual stars at low to moderate magnification, giving it a layered, three-dimensional appearance. Visible from both hemispheres.
Featured Star
Izar (ε Boötis) is a double star 203 light-years away, spectral class K0II + A2V, consisting of a cool orange giant paired with a white main-sequence companion. The color contrast between the two components (orange and blue-white) has made it a favourite among double-star observers; William Herschel called it Pulcherrima, Latin for 'the most beautiful.' The pair requires moderate aperture to split, but the color difference is vivid.
Around This Date
- May 29, 1919Observations of starlight deflection around the Sun during a total solar eclipse provided the first experimental confirmation of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
- May 28, 1959The first animals to survive spaceflight and recovery (Able and Miss Baker) returned safely from a suborbital mission aboard a Jupiter rocket.
An orange giant beside a blue-white star: the sky pairing colors it took us centuries to name.