Bakersfield Night Sky — July 4, 2026
Happy 250th Birthday, United States of America!
Two days from now, on July 6, Earth will be at its farthest distance from the sun, the aphelion point of its elliptical orbit around the sun. We will be 94,503,000 miles from the sun at 10:30 a.m. Pacific time or about 3.4% farther out than our closest approach (perihelion) last January 3 that was at a distance of just 91,404,000 miles from the sun. Despite being so far from the sun, the northern hemisphere is tipped toward the sun, so the sunlight strikes our part of Earth at a steeper angle, concentrating its power. It’s hot despite the distance but because of the angle.
The moon is at last (third) quarter phase at mid-day July 7, though we won’t see it rise until a bit after 1 a.m. that night. By then, it will be a fat crescent, so the closest we will see the moon to being exactly half lit up will be the previous pre-dawn morning of July 7. It will be a steadily shrinking waning crescent phase until July 14, when the lunar phase cycle restarts with the new phase.
Venus is still easily visible as the evening star in the west after sunset but the other bright planet, Jupiter, is getting hard to see lower down in the evening twilight glow. By July 10, Jupiter will probably too close to the sun to see it. Jupiter will be lined up with the sun, at conjunction, on July 29, and will re-appear in our pre-dawn morning sky in about the second week of August. On July 9, Venus will be right next to Leo’s brightest star, Regulus, in the west about an hour after sunset. Regulus will be less than a thumb width at arm’s length below Venus. By the middle of the month, Venus will have moved to the bottom mid-point of Leo, and a waxing crescent moon will be right next to Regulus on July 16.
In the early pre-dawn mornings, look for Mars and Saturn in the east and southeast. Saturn will be the brightest object below the Great Square part of Pegasus, among the dim stars of Pisces. The last quarter moon will be above Saturn on July 7. Mars is above the orange-red eye of Taurus the bull, the star Aldebaran, an orange giant 67 light years away from us (so it’s relatively nearby). Although Aldebaran is just 16% more massive than the sun, it is significantly cooler at just 3900 K compared to the sun’s 5840 K because Aldebaran is in its dying red giant phase. It has expanded to be about 45 times the diameter of the sun. If placed in our solar system, Aldebaran would fill up Mercury’s orbit.
Our sun will turn into a giant star like Aldebaran approximately 5 billion years from now but long before that it will have become too hot on Earth’s surface for life to exist. Since the sun was formed 4.6 billion years ago, it has very slowly increased in brightness—it was about a 25% less bright at its birth than it is now. The increase in brightness is very slow, about 0.008% every million years or 0.0000008% per century, so we can’t blame the current climate change on the sun. About 1.8 billion years from now, the temperature on Earth will be too warm for complex multi-cellular life to exist. Bacteria and archaea microbes may be able to survive for another two billion years beyond that but they too will die out before the sun turns into a red giant. Back to the present day…
On July 11 a thin waning crescent moon will be above Mars by an angular distance of about half a clenched fist at arm’s length. They may just barely fit within the same field of view of your binoculars. The angular separation between Mars and Aldebaran is slightly more than half a clenched fist at arm’s length. While you have your binoculars out on July 11, see if you can spot Uranus to the upper right of Mars at about the same angular separation as the moon is from Mars. A week before that, the pre-dawn morning of July 4, Mars will have been just 7 arc minutes (or just 10% of one degree) below Uranus.
As temperatures rise, please check out Kern County Aging Adult Services webpage for locations of the cooling centers in Kern County. They open up when the temperatures are expected to get 105 degrees or hotter.
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Director of the William M Thomas Planetarium at Bakersfield College
Author of the award-winning website www.astronomynotes.com
