In the early hours of 11 July, the waning crescent moon will be gliding past the beautiful Pleiades star cluster, which is also known as M45 or the Seven Sisters.<\/p>\n
The chart shows the view looking east-north-east from London at 3am BST. By then, the sky will getting ready to start brightening for the coming day, so a clear, low horizon will be essential to see the pairing.<\/p>\n
The moon will be the easiest object to find: a thin crescent, just a few days old, with only 15% of its visible hemisphere illuminated. Its sunlit limb will be pointing down toward the horizon. The compact smudge of the Pleiades will be just off from the opposite, dark limb.<\/p>\n
With the naked eye, the cluster often looks like a mini version of the Plough. Despite its common name, most people see only six stars with the naked eye. However, if you have a pair of binoculars to hand, you will see many more stars.<\/p>\n
Mars will also be nearby, though even lower toward the horizon in Taurus, the Bull. It will be a difficult but rewarding spot if you can pick it out of the rapidly brightening sky. The view is also visible from the southern hemisphere, but Taurus rises in the north-east.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the early hours of 11 July, the waning crescent moon will be gliding past the beautiful Pleiades…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":511977,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-511976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511976\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/511977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}