Bakersfield Night Sky — May 16, 2026
Bakersfield College had another record-breaking graduation yesterday. The William M Thomas Planetarium is closed for the summer. Shows will resume in September.
Today the moon is at new moon phase, so start looking for a thin sliver of a waxing crescent moon low in the west-northwest after sunset starting tomorrow. On May 18, the moon will be next to Venus, the first star-like object you’ll see after sunset because it is so bright. That’ll make a nice photograph! Even though Venus is known as the "evening star”, it shines in the visible band (the wavelengths we can see with our eyes) because of reflected sunlight. Like all of the planets, Venus produces its own light in the infrared band (wavelengths longer than the visible band) because its temperature is much cooler than stars. True stars are so hot that they glow in the visible and ultraviolet band (wavelengths shorter than the visible band).
Since the visible band goes from violet colors at the shortest wavelength end to red colors at the longest wavelength end, the term “infrared” means “below red” and “ultraviolet” means “beyond violet” (ultra-short violet). The other forms of light are not adjacent to the visible band, so their names have no attachment to visible colors: gamma rays (the very shortest wavelengths and highest energy, produced by the very hottest things in the universe), X-rays (also very short wavelengths and high energy produced by things at hundreds of millions of degrees), and radio (the very longest wavelengths and lowest energy produced by things at temperatures far below zero degrees).
Higher in the west will be the other bright planet, Jupiter, also shining from reflected sunlight. Jupiter is now leaving the stars of Gemini on the east (left) side while Venus is now entering Gemini on the west (right) side. On May 19, a fatter crescent moon will be in the middle of Gemini, in between the two bright planets. The following night, the moon will be to the left of Jupiter and make a nice triangle with Jupiter and Gemini’s brightest star, Pollux. The moon will be at first quarter phase (half-lit on the right side) the night of May 22/23 and you’ll see it just to the right of Leo’s brightest star, Regulus, at the end of the Sickle asterism (“backward question mark”). We’ll have a “blue (full) moon” at the end of the month, according to one definition for a blue moon.
As May progresses, you’ll see Venus draw closer to Jupiter. They will be almost touching on June 8 and 9. By the last week of May, you’ll be able to spot Mercury low in the west-northwest shortly after sunset. Mercury will climb up higher in the evening sky until June 10.
In the early morning sky before dawn, you’ll see Saturn and Mars low in the east. Saturn rises before Mars becoming visible among the dim stars of Pisces, below the more easily visible Great Square part of Pegasus, by about 4:15 a.m. Mars becomes visible by about 5 a.m. at the far left (east) edge of Pisces.
The two large rovers on Mars, Curiosity and Perseverance continue their discoveries as they explore regions from very different geologic ages. As Curiosity climbs higher up on Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, it samples ever younger rocks. After six years of careful analysis, the Curiosity team announced that Curiosity had drilled into a rock with the most diverse collection of organic molecules yet found on Mars. Now, we don’t know if the molecules are biological or geological in origin but some of molecules found are predecessors to RNA and DNA that are essential for storing genetic information in life. A bit over 2300 miles from Curiosity, Perseverance is climbing up out of Jezero Crater and will be sampling probably the oldest rocks on Mars.
The James Webb Space Telescope has been looking at very far away objects that date from just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, called “Little Red Dots” (LRDs) that are sprinkled about in many of Webb’s deep-field images. They’re only a few hundred light years across and emit most brightly at the longer infrared wavelengths. Some have suggested that LRDs have large black holes that’ll eventually grow into the supermassive black holes found in most large galaxies today.
One difficulty with the idea is that LRDs don’t emit X-rays that are a tell-tale sign of black holes. The X-rays are created as the gas spiraling into the black holes heats up to become X-ray hot just before the gas crosses the event horizons. A team of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute in Germany observing with Webb found an object a bit closer to us, dating from two billion years after the Big Bang, that has the same spectrum signatures (i.e., the same physical properties) as the LRDs. Cross-referencing that object with X-ray data from archival Chandra X-ray Observatory data (still going strong after 26 years in space!), they found the object was quite bright in X-rays. An easy explanation is that the X-rays from black holes in the LRDs are blocked by the thick cloud of gas surrounding the black holes. Over time, say a billion years or so, the gas cloud would get thinned out enough for the X-rays to become visible and let us know about the black hole’s presence. The “X-ray Dot” could be the missing link between the LRDs and the larger, much closer galaxies. Now that we know what to look for, future observations should discover other examples.
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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
