June 2026 Stargazing Guide
Greetings, junior scientists, 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 June 2026 Star Gazing Guide.
Our longest day of the year happens this month. On June 21st is the summer solstice and on that day sunrise will take place at 5:39 a.m. with sunset at 9:05 p.m. giving us 6 hours and 29 minutes more daylight than the winter solstice in December. So, with these short nights, what should we be looking for?
Well, this month we catch the return of the summer triangle, spot a planetary conjunction, and learn about the most destructive asteroid impact in recorded history.
All this and more when you just take some time...
to look up.
It's 10:30 p.m.
Look high in the east and you'll see a very bright star.
This star is Vega.
14,000 years ago, it was our north star, and if you're around 12,000 years from now, you'll see it as our north star yet again.
It's part of an asterism known as the summer triangle.
An asterism is an easy to spot pattern that might be a small part of a constellation or as in this case is made up of stars from different constellations.
Let's find the other two vertices.
Lower and to the north is Deneb. Deneb is the brightest star in the constellation of Cygnus, the swan.
Lower still and to the south, just cresting the horizon, is Altair.
The brightest star in Aquila, the Eagle.
If we watch this asterism throughout the summer, we can track it rising east until it's directly overhead in late summer and early autumn.
We'll speak more about this asterism in the months to come.
Venus and Jupiter are evening planets this month with Venus rising and Jupiter lowering as the month progresses.
Watch out on June 9th when the two cross paths and appear in conjunction about 45 minutes after sunset.
Our Full Moon this month is on June 29th and it's a micromoon.
You remember the supermoon, right?
When the Moon is closer to us because of its elliptical orbit?
Well, the micromoon occurs when the Moon is just that much further away.
The June Full Moon is known as the Strawberry Moon called Ode'min - giizis by the Anishinaabe people who actually named it the Heart Berry Moon, due to the aggregate accessory fruit’s unique shape. The Mi’kmaw people call it Nipniku’s, the Trees Fully Leafed Moon.
The first day of summer is June 21st and it's defined by the summer solstice.
The Earth has an axis that it rotates about. It's like an imaginary line between the north and south poles.
It takes 24 hours for one full rotation around this axis, which we define as a day.
Now, this axis isn't perfectly perpendicular to our orbit around the sun. It's actually tipped at 23.5°.
The winter solstice in December marks the day of the year that the North Pole is actually tipped its furthest distance from the Sun.
The summer solstice on June 21st is the day that the North Pole is tipped closest towards the Sun.
And as a result, the northern hemisphere experiences the most daylight hours that it gets all year.
This is often referred to as the longest day of the year, which is kind of confusing because a day only has 24 hours. In reality, it's actually the day that we experience the most daylight hours in a year.
As we head towards winter, the daylight hours will now begin to decrease in length, while the nighttime hours will extend for even more stargazing.
June 30th is Asteroid Day.
What's an asteroid?
Unlike comets, which are made of ice and dust, an asteroid is just a big rock floating through space.
But larger than a meteoroid, so bigger than 1 metre and in this case orbiting the Sun.
On the morning of June 30th in 1908, a 30 metre diameter asteroid exploded about 5 to 10 km above the ground in Tunguska, Russia.
This explosion was the equivalent of 50 megatons of TNT and leveled 80 million trees in a space of 2,150 km, double the land mass of New York City.
It's estimated to be a thousand times stronger than the detonation of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.
This is the largest impact on Earth that's ever been recorded in history and asteroid day is a day of awareness sanctioned by the United Nations around asteroids, the risks they pose to us, and planetary defense.
There's lots of information about this online, but check out the great links in the description from our good friends at the Planetary Society.
There's something special about these hot summer nights.
Staying up late and waiting for that thin curtain of daylight to shimmer out of existence and unveil the stars that lie beneath.
Light that's taken millions of years to travel this far, allowing us to see into our past.
As long as we take some time...
to look up.
See you next month, junior scientists and don't forget to have a science-tastic day!
Special thanks to Royal City Science's own planetary geochemist, Dr. Glynis Perrett, for her help in preparing our star gazing guide
and the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada.