In July, find the Scorpius constellation to identify the reddish supergiant Antares, which will lead you to discover a trio of globular star clusters. Keep watching for space-based views of these densely packed, spherical collections of ancient stars, as well as three nebulas: the Swan Nebula, the Lagoon Nebula, and the Trifid Nebula.
The government shutdown last winter has had lasting effects on cool stuff like Tonight’s Sky.
First, the very popular narrator was eliminated from the videos earlier this year, much to the dismay of the many fans of this video series. While she returned a few months ago, the newer videos have changed dramatically — the information on the planetary alignments and highlights aren’t in the videos anymore.
A bigger concern for me, the main Hubble Site has revamped their website, and visitors can no longer download copies of the videos. The PDFs of the narration transcripts had also been removed, but the one for July 2019 seems to have been added back to the website after the weekend. But, there’s no way to access the older videos/transcripts anymore, which is an archive I’m sad to see eliminated.
New website: https://hubblesite.org/resource-gallery/learning-resources/tonights-sky
I don’t know if feedback about these missing items will encourage the team that makes them to add some of the missing features back in future videos, but we can only continue to ask.. The transcript being available again is a good thing, and the planetary updates would be welcomed back as well.