S ummer can be a blessing for stargazers, and it tends to bring out casual night-sky watchers, too. There are certainly many spectacles to glimpse, from planets and stars to globular clusters and distant nebulae.
It’s the globular clusters that can hold particular majesty this time of year. Huge conglomerations of ancient stars, they often contain hundreds of thousands of members, all packed into a relatively small part of space. If you were to find yourself on a planet orbiting one of those stars, you would see tens of thousands of stars in your night sky. The output of the starlight from this host would easily be enough for you to read a book in the pitch black of the middle of the night. A sky like this would put the best stargazing spots in the world to shame.
The Milky Way also shows us its more spectacular side in the summer as the galactic centre briefly peers above the horizon, allowing us a glimpse into its spectacular dust lanes. The zodiac constellation of Sagittarius, with its famous Teapot asterism, is the place to look.
As with all times of the year, you’ll need a range of observing equipment
