Our Dark Sky Advisor, Steve Tonkin, takes a look at the May night sky.
Short summer nights are not ideal for stargazing, but there are two ‘cloudy’ phenomena that are worth watching for.
The first of these requires a low south eastern horizon. Once the sky has darkened look low in the south east where you should be able to see the densest part of our galaxy, the Milky Way, just above the horizon. It’s densest in that direction because we are looking towards the galactic centre, where stars are most densely packed. If we scaled stars like our Sun down to the size of golf-balls, the scaled distance between them in our part of the galaxy would about 500 miles between them (now you know why it’s called ‘space’!), but in the core of the galaxy it’s a mere 3 miles or so.
It’s so dense there that it’s not unusual for the galactic star clouds to be mistaken for atmospheric clouds, but binoculars will reveal that there are myriads of stars.
The other cloudy phenomenon requires a good northern horizon. If you are lucky, you may see wisps of ethereal silky-silver cloud-like structures. These are noctilucent (which means ‘night-shining’) clouds, or NLCs. NLCs occur between about 30 and 50 miles high, much higher than our weather clouds; they are composed of minuscule ice crystals which lit by the Sun, is only just below the horizon in summer.