THE MOON waxes to first quarter by Wednesday, becoming gibbous by the end of the week. Evening stargazing is better in the early part of the week.
THIS WEEK: We met Aquila the Eagle a couple weeks back; now let's greet its partner in flight, Cygnus the Swan, in the east to Aquila's left. Cygnus appears to be flying toward Aquila, with Deneb its bright beacon in the tail ("deneb" means tail in Arabic; spring star Denebola in Leo means "lion's tail"). But the head star, Albireo, is worth a telescope view.
To the naked eye Albireo is a nondescript star, but in a telescope it breaks into a magnificent pair, one blue and one gold-orange. Many astronomy buffs consider Albireo the prettiest binary visible regularly in North America.
Deneb is a naturally powerful star, 1,600 light-years away but with a light tens of thousands of times brighter than the sun. It is one of the most powerful known visible stars.
DID YOU KNOW? The light you see coming from Deneb left the star a few decades before the fall of the Roman Empire.
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