Messier 55 is well placed

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Deep Sky feed


Objects: M55

Across much of the world, the globular cluster M55 (NGC 6809l; mag 6.3) in Sagittarius will be well placed in the evening sky in coming weeks. On 17 July it will reach its highest point in the sky at around midnight local time, and on subsequent evenings it will culminate four minutes earlier each day.

From Columbus , however, it is not readily observable since it lies so far south that it will never rise more than 19° above the horizon.

At a declination of 30°57'S, it is easiest to see from the southern hemisphere but cannot be seen from latitudes much north of 39°N.

At magnitude 6.3, M55 is quite faint, and certainly not visible to the naked eye, but can be viewed through a pair of binoculars or small telescope.

The position of M55 is as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
M55 19h39m50s 30°57'S Sagittarius 6.3 0'00"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 18 Jul 2025

The sky on 18 July 2025
Sunrise
06:15
Sunset
20:57
Twilight ends
22:53
Twilight begins
04:19


Waning Crescent

42%

23 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 08:03 14:51 21:39
Venus 03:26 10:42 17:59
Moon 00:43 07:39 14:48
Mars 10:39 17:00 23:22
Jupiter 04:54 12:21 19:48
Saturn 23:57 05:55 11:53
All times shown in EDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

Image credit

© Digitised Sky Survey (DSS); Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-II)

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