May 2026 Stargazing Guide

Greetings, junior science, scientists and citizens of this great big weird, wild and wonderful world in which we live. As always, I'm your humble science communicator, the great Orbax, coming to you from the Department of Physics here at the University of Guelph and I'd like to welcome you to our May 2026 Star Gazing Guide.

Well, we're a little late this month.

And why?

I was lucky enough to spend some time in the Arctic Circle with our portable planetarium, which we'll talk about today.

But what's left this month in our May night skies?

This month, we catch some evening planets, spot a Blue Moon, and watch a particularly peculiar incident on Mars.

All this and more when you just take some time

... to look up.

Now, you may have noticed that our May evenings may appear a little more...

May?

Anymay, Venus has been a shining beacon in the west all month, so bright that it's actually visible before the Sun has fully set.

On May 29th, it'll be at its highest altitude in the evening sky before it starts to lower as June approaches.

Jupiter also joins Venus in the 'super-bright-in-the-early-evening' club this month, also appearing in the west with both setting around midnight.

Speaking of planets,

a few weeks ago on Mars,

the planet of robots,

our favorite robot,

the Curiosity Rover,

got itself into a little bit of a pickle.

While drilling into a 13 kg, half-metre wide rock named Atacama the drill became lodged in stone and upon lifting, Atacama came with it.

Okay, so now what?

You've got a huge stone stuck on your robot over 200 million km away and if you can't get it off, what do you do?

Luckily for NASA engineers, after several attempts over the course of a week, they were finally able to break free after rotating, spinning, and vibrating the drill, leaving Atacama in pieces on the Martian surface.

Featured prominently in the footage of this incident is the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer or the APXS, the instrument used to determine the chemical composition of those Martian samples, whose principal investigator is our very own Dr. Ralf Gellert here in the Department of Physics at the University of Guelph.

Our Full Moon this month was on May 1st.

Oops.

And was known as the Flower Moon.

But fear not my moon lovers because this month we have a very rare occurrence of a second Full Moon in the same calendar month.

This is the most popular definition of a Blue Moon.

And not only is the May 31st Full Moon a Blue Moon, but it's also a micro-moon.

This simply means that the Moon is the furthest away from Earth that it gets in its orbit and it'll appear smaller than usual. It's the opposite of a Super Moon.

The Mi’kmaw refer to this late May Moon as Sqoljuiku’s, the Frog Croaking Moon named for the sounds the frogs make… sqolch.

Earlier this month, Dr. Joanne O'Meara and myself were lucky enough to participate in STEAM week in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. This event is put on by Makigiaqta Inuit Training Corporation who run annual career camps to enhance the preparedness for employment of Nunavut Inuit youth.

This weeklong STEAM camp was aimed at high school students who were flown in from around Nunavut and stayed at the Canadian High Arctic Research Station.

Over the course of the week, these students and their chaperones participated in workshops, lectures, and lessons provided by partners including the Arctic Rose Foundation, SHAD,  Ampere, Actua, Polar Knowledge Canada, and the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board.

Thanks to funding from the University of Guelph we were not only able to facilitate astronomy and physics workshops,

but we were able to bring along our massive inflatable planetarium.

This trip was unlike anything I've ever experienced.

Not only was the community incredibly welcoming, but the students were enthusiastic and inspiring.

While we shared our knowledge of physics and astronomy, we were also lucky enough to learn about things like sea ice, Inuit mathematics, wildlife migration, engineering, microbial biology, and the Inuit people and their heritage.

If you're in Nunavut or know of high school students who would benefit from these programs, I highly recommend these career camps and programming provided by the hardworking people at Makigiaqta.

So that's May. I suppose they say it's better late than never.

And on that note, remember that it's never too late to take some time

... and look up.

See you next month, junior scientists. And don't forget to have a science-tastic day.

Special thanks to the Royal City Science's own planetary geocchemist, Dr. Glynis Perrett for her help in preparing our Star Gazing Guide and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.