Mike wrote, “I noticed on your site that Orion returned to the predawn sky in late July. You called it the ‘ghost of the summer dawn.’ Due to cloudy skies and other conditions, I was not able to see it until August 6. When will Orion return to the evening sky?”
Mike, Orion the Hunter is always behind the sun as seen from Earth in June. It comes back to the predawn sky every year in late July. By early September, Orion is rising in the wee hours and is well up in the southeast an hour before dawn, as shown on today’s chart.
Orion will soon be up by midnight, then 10 p.m. … and by December you’ll find it rising in early evening.
There’s nothing unusual about Orion’s shift from the predawn to the evening sky. This constellation is simply following the westward shift of all the stars, caused by Earth’s orbit around the sun. As we orbit the sun, our night sky points toward an ever-changing panorama of the Milky Way galaxy. Our orbit causes all the stars to rise approximately 4 minutes earlier each day.
If you’re an early riser, look to the southeast and spot Orion the Hunter roaming the September predawn sky.
I was lucky to be able to spend August in a dark-sky part of Utah, and got up whenever I woke during the night, and went outside to look at the amazing sights. I saw Orion many times, beginning at 3:30 a.m., and probably moving to around 4:30 a.m. I was even able to see his dagger (?) hanging from his belt. That’s something I never see in Las Vegas. I could even tell when a couple of his stars had come over the ridges, and watched as the rest of him followed. So beautiful!
I noticed a bright object in the sky(12oclock high) above me from 2am -3am. During the great southern Cal black out,The moon was setting in the west.(towards Oceanside) I thought it was too large/close to be a planet.
I did not have adequate binoculars to get a close view or telescope, it was viewed from my home in fallbrook.
I did notice some magnificient meteors on the horizon with long tails, they caught my imagination.
Is the bright object/ venus or other another planet? appears very close!
I will view it later tonight/this moring.
if you have any insight, I would like to know.
Artist Dan Martinez
star gazer
Hay, Dan do a search for, Stellarium download, it’s free and very cool for star gazers.
Yesterday and today I saw, thanks to this site’s info, the very close appearance of Mercury and Regulus. Where I live they didn’t pair up, yet they were very close. This happened some 35 minutes before sunrise. Mercury was very easy to see with my naked eyes –similar in size to big Canopus in the south– but to see Regulus I first needed binoculars; then I could easily see both without binos, but they looked even nicer using them! Mercury looked at least 5 times bigger and brighter then Regulus IMO though…
And of course I did not miss the chance to look at the Orion nebula with my binos, Orion is IMO BY FAR the coolest constellation of them all, the Orion Belt is THE ONLY asterism I can recognize anywhere, no matter if it’s a very dark or light-polluted sky, or if it is a northern, equatorial or southern sky, it’s always fairly easy to recognize and extremely beautiful to look at, thank God for Orion, to me its presence makes cold cloudless/rainless days in Autumn and Winter much more bearable!