Bakersfield Night Sky — August 15, 2026
Venus is now beginning its slow descent back toward the sun as it catches up to Earth in its faster inner orbit. Because Venus’ orbit is so close to Earth’s, Venus’ speed is just slightly faster than us. Venus will take another two months before it passes by Earth at inferior conjunction. Although less of Venus’ dayside will be facing us, appearing as a thinner and thinner crescent, Venus is still going to get brighter because of its closer distance to us. Eventually, there will be too little of the dayside facing us to keep getting brighter despite its close distance to us. It’ll reach its peak brightness around September 20–26. Look for Venus blazing away in the west-southwest after sunset.
On August 12, the new moon was lined right up exactly with the sun to make a total solar eclipse visible several timezones east of us. Such nice alignments mean the full moon before or after the solar eclipse will pass through Earth’s shadow to make a lunar eclipse. This month, the lunar eclipse is after, happening the evening of August 27.
Sometimes it’ll be a total lunar eclipse with the moon all the way in the Earth’s umbra (total shadow) but sometimes the moon will be just a bit above or below the umbra to make a partial lunar eclipse. We’re going to have a partial lunar eclipse this time but it will be almost total with just 7% of the moon’s diameter (or 4% of its surface area) outside of the umbra. So much of the moon will be in the umbra that we’ll see the moon’s color change to the orange-red of total lunar eclipses. Well, it might be more like a yellow-orange color than orange-red.
The moon begins to enter Earth’s umbra at 7:33 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. The full moon will be rising low in the east at that time. The deepest part of the eclipse is at 9:13 p.m. The moon will be about 20 degrees altitude at that time (about a couple of fist widths at arm’s length above a flat horizon) in the east-southeast. The moon exits the umbra at 10:52 p.m. when it’ll be about 35 degrees altitude in the southeast.
The attached star chart shows the moon’s position at the deepest time of eclipse for us in the Bakersfield area. To the left of the moon is the Great Square part of Pegasus. High up overhead is the Summer Triangle formed by Vega (almost at the zenith position), Deneb at the left vertex and Altair at the bottom right vertex. Deneb is at the top end of what looks like a tipped-over cross, what is actually the body and wings of Cygnus the swan. For the swan, Deneb is at the tail and the bottom of the cross is the beak of the swan, the star Albireo. In fact, the name “Deneb” is from an Arabic word meaning “tail”. The name “Albireo” has a convoluted origin from a Latin translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest (written in Greek).
Albireo is a beautiful double star that appears as a single star to the naked eye but resolves into a yellow and blue pair with a low-powered telescope. Because the two stars are right next to each other, our eyes tend to exaggerate the color difference. Separately, the two stars’ colors would be much more muted to our eyes but together the colors are enhanced. It makes a pretty sight in a telescope!
The two stars are probably just an optical double instead of being gravitationally bound to each other in a true physical binary. However, the yellow star of the pair is actually a true binary with a yellow-orange giant and a white-hot smaller, normal star orbiting each other every 214 years (though there’s quite a bit of uncertainty of the orbit period with one of my sources quoting a period as small as 100 years).
As I write this, NASA’s next large space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, is still set to launch at the end of the month on August 30, nine months ahead of the original schedule. With a mirror the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope’s but a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s, Roman is going to help us figure out the role of black holes, dark matter, and dark energy in forming and shaping galaxies, galaxy clusters, and superclusters.
Launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy is set for no earlier than 4:26 a.m. PDT on the morning of August 30 from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. It will take about three months to reach its final orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange (L2) point, 930,000 miles away from Earth in the direction opposite the sun. On its way to L2, the instruments will be activated and aligned, so we’re expecting the First Look Observations to be released at the end of November or beginning of December.
Up to 75% of Roman’s first five years will be spent on three surveys using Roman’s Wide Field Instrument. Two of them will be of regions looking up and below almost perpendicular to the Milky Way’s galactic disk (“high latitude” surveys). The third major survey is going to look inward toward the Galaxy’s central bulge.
Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument will look for exoplanets by blocking the light of the host star. Roman will also be able to find exoplanets using the transit and microlensing techniques.
As temperatures rise, please check out
the Kern County Adult Services Cooling Centers webpage for where are 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
