The Night Sky in July 2026
At the beginning of July Venus and Jupiter are the ‘evening stars’, appearing in the northwest soon after sunset. Jupiter has a golden colour and is low in the sky (so not on the chart.) Venus is brilliant white, bright enough to cast shadows in dark locations. Jupiter sets earlier each night as we move to the far side of the Sun from it. By mid-month it is getting lost in the twilight, setting 50 minutes after the Sun.
Venus moves higher night-to-night as it catches up on us from the far side of the Sun. By the end of the month it is setting four hours after the Sun, a brilliant object in the dark sky. Venus is bright enough to see by eye in daylight, if you can focus on infinity. Around 3:30 pm it is due north, one-third to halfway up the sky, depending on your location. On the 17th Venus will be 6.5° to the right of the thin crescent Moon. On the 18th it will be a similar angle below and left of the Moon. 6.5° is 13 full-moon widths.
Sirius, the brightest true star, sets in the southwest as twilight ends, twinkling like a diamond. Canopus, the second brightest star, is also in the southwest at dusk. It swings down to the southern skyline before midnight where it also twinkles colourfully. It then moves up into the southeast sky in the morning hours. It is a 'circumpolar star'. Seen from Aotearoa it never sets, except in the most northern places. Canopus is a truly bright star: 13 000 times the sun's brightness and 300 light-years* away.
South of the zenith are 'The Pointers', Beta and Alpha Centauri. They point to Crux, the Southern Cross, on their right. Alpha Centauri is the third brightest star in the sky. It is also the closest of the naked eye stars, 4.3 light-years away. Beta Centauri, like most of the stars in Crux, is a hot blue-giant star hundreds of light-years away. Crux and the Pointers are also circumpolar. They are always somewhere in our southern sky. In summer they are upside down and low in the south.
East of overhead is Scorpius. The orange-red star Antares marks the scorpion’s body. Its tail and sting curl off to the right. Later in the night the tail curls around the zenith. The Moon will be near Antares on the 24th and 25th. The name Antares comes from ancient Greek meaning “rival to Mars”. Ares was the Greek name for Mars. Mars has a similar colour and brightness to Antares, except when it is close to us.
Midway down the north sky is orange Arcturus. It sets in the northwest around midnight, twinkling red and green as it goes. It is the fourth brightest star and the brightest in the northern hemisphere sky. It is 120 times the sun's brightness and 37 light-years away. It has an orange colour because it is cooler than the Sun; around 4000°C. Above Arcturus is a lone bright star, Spica, the brightest star in Virgo. The Moon will be close to Spica on the 21st. Vega rises in the northeast around 9 pm. It is on the opposite side of the sky to Canopus: low in the north when Canopus is low in the south. Vega is the fifth-brightest star in the sky and the second-brightest northern hemisphere star. It is 52 times brighter than the Sun and 25 light-years away.
The Milky Way is brightest and broadest in the east toward Scorpius and Sagittarius. In a dark sky it can be traced up past the Pointers and Crux, fading toward Sirius. The Milky Way is our edgewise view of the galaxy, the pancake of billions of stars of which the sun is just one. The thick hub of the galaxy, 30 000 light-years away, is in Sagittarius. The actual centre is hidden by dust clouds in space. A scan along the Milky Way with binoculars shows many clusters of stars and some glowing gas clouds.
Saturn rises due east around midnight. It is a lone cream-coloured ‘star’. By dawn it is due north, halfway up the sky. Orange-red Mars is in the morning sky, rising before 5 a.m. At the beginning of July, it will be between orange Aldebaran and the Matariki/Pleiades star cluster. They move higher, leaving Mars behind. On the morning of the 4th the planet Uranus will be 21’, two-thirds of a full moon’s width, below Mars. On the 5th it will be 20’ above and left of Mars. In a dark sky Uranus is just visible without a telescope. Unfortunately, moonlight will be bright on the above dates, hiding the faint planet. Both Mars and Uranus show tiny disks in a telescope with Uranus having a blue-green tint.
*A light-year (l.y.) is the distance that light travels in one year: nearly 10 million million km. Sunlight takes eight minutes to get here; moonlight about one second. Sunlight reaches Neptune, the outermost major planet, in four hours. It takes sunlight four years to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
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