This Week's Night Sky: Ghostly Stellar Ring Revealed
Pluto is only one of several celestial bodies putting on a show this week.
While Pluto steals the headlines, sky-watchers can hunt down a distant dying star’s last breath.
Joining the cosmic party is Regulus, the lead star in the constellation Leo. The bright blue-white star sits to the upper left of Venus.
Train a small telescope on both planets to reveal them as disks. While brighter Venus appears only quarter-lit, Jupiter’s dark cloud belts and moons will be easy to see. But remember that these neighboring worlds will be low towards the western horizon and will set about an hour and half after the sun does.
Sky-watchers under very dark skies using a telescope with at least an 8-inch mirror have a good chance to spot the magnitude 14.1 speck of light in the constellation Sagittarius.
