The Sun’s gone down, the starry crowd goes down, One golden star presides at heaven’s crown.
In May evenings, the Milky Way has tilted so that it lies almost around the horizon. The glistering constellations of winter – Auriga, Taurus, Gemini, Orion, Canis Minor and Major – are sinking in the west. The hemisphere of sky that is north of the Milky Way has few and widely spaced stars of the first magnitude. The brightest of them, near the middle of this dark bowl, is Arcturus, with its discernibly deeper-than-yellow tint.
By midnight, Arcturus will have climbed to the zenith, and Jupiter and Saturn will have risen in the east.
Over on at the other end of the night, Venus is becoming ever lower toward the sunrose horizon, and even more so because on this date it is at its southernmost latitude – just over 3 degrees south of the ecliptic plane.
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DIAGRAMS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor. One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge. Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). I am grateful to know of what methods work for you.
Visuallizing the Milky Way tends to discombobulate me. Maybe if the soar system plane (ecliptic) were more closely aligned with the plane of our galaxy (Milky Way) it would be easier for me to comprehend it as a plane rather than a big ring in the sky. It just seems like it should have a beginning and an end. I assume it never ends because we are inside it and so we see our galactic companion stars at 360 degrees.
Describing the dark bowl of the hemisphere north of the Milky Way helps me grasp our overall view from Earth.
Yes, all “great circles” are somewhat difficult to comprehend. An idea occurs to me: if you are in a swimming pool, and your eyes are at the level of the top of the water, that surface (a plane) makes a great circle around you.
The ecliptic plane is almost perpendicular to the galactic plane. My best attempt to show the relations of the planes is the “Four Planes” diagram on page 7 of the Astronomical Compaion. It means the solar system )a disk of planets) is traveling in the galaxy almost though not quite face-on, like the windscreen of a car.
The swimming pool analogy helps. I’ll also purchase a copy of Astro Companion (or rather put it on my Christmas / Birthday / Father’s day list so my kids can buy it for me).