Last week the full moon appeared larger than usual as the moon today reaches its perigee – the point at which it is closest to the Earth (367,095km away). With the new moon next week the Milky Way will start shin­ing through as the constel­lations Scorpius and Sagittarius appear in the evening skies.

Head to dark sky areas (the north­western coast of Malta is ideal) to be able to view to see the rich star clouds of the Milky Way easily with the naked eye or binoculars.

In this region of space we find the accompanying image of a colourful nebula. The image shows also a bright globular star cluster called M4, located around 7,000 light years away. This means we see M4 only as it was 7,000 years ago – at the dawn of the earliest evidence of human settlement in Malta.

With the summer solstice (June 21) having passed we start noticing that the sun starts setting earlier throughout the month. The first day of summer is actually that point, along the Earth’s orbit, where the days start getting shorter again.

Mercury rises early in the pre-dawn hours for the first half of the month. All interest lies, however, in the evening skies where Venus and Jupiter steal the show. At maximum brightness, Venus encountered Jupiter last week and now the two planets move away from each other. Their separation will be greater in the latter half of the month.

The very slender moon slides by Jupiter and Venus on July 18, making for a photo opportunity. With a DSLR camera try shooting a one-second exposure of this event as all three objects will lie only a few degrees of each other.

Venus’s reign as a bright evening ‘star’ ends this month, after which it disappears into the evening twilight as it moves along its orbit to get closer to the sun, as seen from the Earth. By the end of August, Venus will appear once again, but this time it will be low in the east during the morning dawn twilight.

Without a telescope, all planets easily visible to the unaided eye look like stars. These include Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. A telescope will show Saturn’s ring system in full glory as they are nearly face on towards the Earth this year.

The New Horizons spacecraft launched in January 2006 will be near its planned encounter with Pluto, after having travelled over 7.5 billion kilometres. Instruments on board will make measurements as it hurtles by on July 14 at nearly 60,000km/h. The mission will hopefully answer questions such as what the surface of Pluto looks like, what its atmos­phere is made of, and how it interacts with particles emitted from the sun?

Astronomical events this month

Alexei Pace is president of the Astronomical Society of Malta.