cosmos

Vega, one of the brightest stars, is often mispronounced as "VAY-ga" but should be "WEE-ga," meaning "falling eagle" in Arabic. Visible at nightfall, it shines blue overhead, contrasting with the orange Arcturus. Located 25 light-years away, it’s 58 times brighter than the sun and spins much faster, completing a rotation in just 11 hours. In 12,000 years, Vega will become Earth's pole star. It also displays a rare blueshift, pointing to the direction we're traveling in space.

Arcturus: A Star Worth Saluting: On the next clear evening around 8 p.m., look west and halfway up the sky—you’ll spot Arcturus, a bright pastel-orange star and the fourth brightest we can see from Earth. It once famously opened the 1933 Chicago World's Fair with its light and is unique among bright stars for its wild, plunging path through space. Unlike stars that circle with the Milky Way, Arcturus is just passing through—so catch a glimpse while you can. It's the brightest thing in tonight’s sky… and it won’t be there forever.

The Perseid meteor shower has begun. While the best viewing typically occurs after midnight when your location faces forward into the meteor stream, this year’s full moon is bright enough to interfere with visibility. To get around this, it's best to start watching at dusk, before the moon rises. The Perseids are tiny bits of ice from comet Swift Tuttle, disintegrating as they enter Earth's atmosphere. About one in 20 meteors, however, is a background meteor from the asteroid belt, which can survive their fiery descent. These "sturdy" meteors can even crash through roofs at speeds of up to 250 miles per hour. Despite the rarity of such impacts, insurance usually covers the damage.

We explore the quirky world of units—from the 1999 Mars Orbiter disaster caused by a metric vs. imperial mix-up to the colorful ways we measure everything from chili pepper heat to cotton and paper. You'll learn why U.S. territorial waters were once based on the range of a cannon shot, how Fahrenheit’s scale reflects geometric symmetry, and why a "barrel" of oil isn’t the same as a barrel of beer. With oddball units like skeins, quires, and cords still in use, maybe it’s finally time we all bolted over to metric!

On Wednesday, July 23, we saw a rare cosmic pairing as the Moon passes unusually close to Spica, the brilliant blue star in Virgo. Thanks to a unique tilt in the Moon’s orbit — an event that won’t repeat until 2043 — this striking alignment becomes visible to the naked eye. Learn why Spica shines so hot and bright, and how to pronounce its name the right way. Look up between 9:30 and 10 p.m. for a glimpse of this fleeting spectacle.

Time to explore a radical new idea shaking up our understanding of the cosmos: what if dark matter doesn’t exist at all? Some European astronomers propose that the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies may have already collided once in the distant past—a theory that challenges long-held beliefs about gravity and the mysterious dark matter thought to hold galaxies together. Instead, they point to a bold alternative called MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics), which suggests gravity behaves differently on cosmic scales. If true, this could rewrite everything we know about the structure and evolution of the universe.

The Rosendale Theater will host, "The Effects of Gravity," on July 1 at 8 p.m. The event features astrophysicist Dr. Luke Keller, poet and storyteller David Gonzalez, and guitarist-composer- Álvaro Domene.

A new exhibition now open at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College is Parallax: Framing the Cosmos.

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is director of the Hayden Planetarium, hosts Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey and is the former host of NOVA ScienceNOW on PBS. On…