Summer Triangle stars as autumn evenings start drawing in
We may be edging towards autumn, but the Summer Triangle, the asterism formed by the bright stars Vega, Altair and Deneb, looms high in the south as night falls and shifts into the high southwest by our star map times later in the evening. Vega, almost overhead as the night begins, is the brightest of the three and lies in the small box-shaped constellation of Lyra the Lyre.
The next brightest, Altair in Aquila the Eagle, stands lower in the middle of our southern sky and, at 16.7 light years (ly), is one of the nearest bright stars to the Sun – eight light years closer than Vega. Flanking Altair, like the two sides of a balance, are the fainter stars Alshain (below Altair) and Tarazed (above) whose names come from “shahin-i tarazu”, the Arabic phrase for a balance.
Deneb, 25° from Vega, lies very high in the south-east at nightfall and overhead at our map times. It marks the tail of Cygnus the Swan which is flying overhead with wings outstretched and its long neck reaching south-westwards to Albireo, traditionally the swan’s beak. Although it is the dimmest corner-star of the Triangle, Deneb is one of the most luminous stars in our galaxy. Current estimates suggest that it shines some 200,000 time more brightly than our Sun from a distance of perhaps 2,600 ly, but its power and distance are hard to measure and the subject of some controversy.
Also controversial is the nature of Albireo. Even small telescopes show it as a beautiful double star in which a brighter golden star contrasts with a dimmer blue one. The mystery concerns whether the pair make up a real binary, with the two stars locked in orbit together by gravity, or whether this is just the chance alignment of two stars at different distances. Now measurement by the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft appear to confirm the chance alignment theory.
The Milky Way, the band of countless distant stars in the plane of our galaxy, flows through the Summer Triangle and close to Deneb as it arches across our evening sky. Scan it through binoculars to glimpse a scattering of other double stars and star clusters.
One interesting stellar group is the so-called Coathanger which lies 8°, a little more than a normal binocular fieldof-view, south of Albireo. It is also easy to locate one third of the way from Altair to Vega. Its line of stars, with a hook of stars beneath, gives it the appearance of an upsidedown coat hanger. For decades this was regarded as a true star cluster, whose stars formed together, and its alternative designations as Brocchi’s Cluster and Collinder 399 reflect this. In 1998, though, results from the Hipparcos satellite, Gaia’s predecessor, proved that the Coathanger’s stars are at very different distances so that it, like Albireo, is simply a fortuitous chance alignment.
The Sun sinks 11.5° southwards during September to cross the sky’s equator at 02:54 BST on the 23rd. This marks our autumnal equinox and, by one definition, the beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere. Sunrise/sunset times for Edinburgh change
from 06:17/20:07 BST on the 1st at 07:13/18:51 on the 30th. The Moon is at last quarter on the 3rd, new on the 9th, at first quarter on the 17th and full on the 25th.
Venus is brilliant at magnitude -4.4 and 45° from the Sun tomorrow but it is only 4° above Edinburgh’s westsouth-western horizon at sunset and sets 35 minutes later as its evening apparition as seen from Scotland comes to an end.
The other inner planet, Mercury, is prominent but low in the east-north-east before dawn until about the 14th. Glimpse it at magnitude -1.1 when it lies 1° above-left of Regulus in Leo on the 6th and 9° below-left of the impressively earthlit waning Moon on the 8th. Jupiter is conspicuous but very low in the south-west at nightfall, sinking to set in the west-south-west one hour before our map times. Look for it below-right of the Moon on the 13th.
Saturn and Mars are in the far south of our evening sky. Saturn, the fainter of the two at magnitude 0.4 to 0.5, stands above the Teapot of Sagittarius and is just below and right of the Moon on the 17th when a telescope shows that its rings span 38 arcseconds around its 17 arcseconds disk. It sets in the south-west some 70 minutes after our map times.
Mars stands more than 25° east (left) of Saturn, tracks 7° eastwards and northwards in Capricornus and stands near the Moon on the 19th and 20th. It is easily the brightest object (bar the Moon) in the sky at our map times though it more than halves in brightness from magnitude -2.1 to -1.3. As its distance increases from 67 million to 89 million km, its ochre disk shrinks from 21 to 16 arcseconds. The dust storm that blanketed the planet since June has now died down.
Finally, we have a chance to spot the Comet Giacobini-zinner as it tracks southeastwards past the bright star Capella in Auriga, low in the north-east at our map times but high in the east before dawn. The comet takes only 6.6 years to orbit the Sun and should appear in binoculars as a small oval greenish smudge only 0.9° to the right of Capella on the evening of the 2nd when it is 60 million km away. Moving at almost 2° per day, it passes less than 7° north-east of Elnath in Taurus (see chart) on the morning of the 11th, just a day after it reaches perihelion, its closest (152 million km) to the Sun.