Asteroid 3 Juno will be at opposition on July 26. Here is the finger chart on page 126 of Astronomical Calendar 2026.
At magnitude 9, Juno is at least 3 magnitudes too dim for the naked eye. It would be interesting to know whether it can be just discerned with powerful binoculars. Stars in the chart are as dim as mag 10. You’d have to look on more than one night and note a “star” that moved – the clue by which this and the other early asteroids were discovered.
Juno’s oppositions are always close to the celestial equator, as explained with another illustrations in the Astronomical Calendar.
We’re going to have some more to say about recently named asteroids.
Earthjustice department
That environmentalist group says “Hit Pause on Data Centers in Space.”
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Guy, thanks for the alert about Juno! If it’s clear here in central Virginia, I will try to get a picture of the star field and identify it.
As exciting as picking out a 9th magnitude dot and identifying it as our third asteroid undoubtedly is, slightly more interesting is the upcoming solar eclipse in August. We are traveling to Spain to see it. Are you planning to discuss the eclipse in an upcoming post?
I’m sure there will be more to say about the eclipse.
Here in San Francisco, depending on how clear the weather is, I can see stars down to third or fourth magnitude naked eye. With my 10×42 binoculars I can see stars, planets, and asteroids down to between magnitude 8.0 and 8.5. Recently I’ve been enjoying watching Neptune and Vesta, both of which are magnitude 7.9, when the weather has been clear before dawn.
The magnitude scale really is logarithmic! 9.0 is too faint for me to see with my 10×42 binoculars from my environs. Maybe 15×70 binoculars would work, but I haven’t tried them. One problem is that as you look for fainter things there are exponentially more faint stars to sort through.
The August 2026 issue of “Astronomy” magazine has a good article, “AI Outgrows Earth” by Brooks Mendenhall about the possibility of putting data centers in orbit. Mendenhall reviews the engineering challenges and the economics, as well as the harm they would do to astronomical observations and cultural experiences of the sky, and the huge environmental risks. On the engineering side, these things would need huge radiators to cool them. For the foreseeable future, orbital data centers would not be profitable compared to terrestrial data centers run by renewable energy. Unfortunately I can’t find a link to an online version of the article.
Like the hare-brained idea of putting huge mirrors in orbit and reflecting sunlight onto the night side of Earth, even if government regulators are too corrupt and ideologically blind to say no, we can hope that simple market forces will restrain the most extreme manifestations of techno-idiocy.