Professor Kelly Cline brings the skies over Montana to life with these special reports on what you can find in the nights sky. Dr. Cline also explains how our night skies work and  gives viewers the opportunity to explore Astronomy.

Although this event could not be seen in Montana Skies, it was still a spectacular sight. The next Solar Eclips to be seen in north America will be 2017.

NASA Video             

Eclipse delights millions in Siberia, China

XI'AN, China - The moon's shadow swept across the planet from Canada to China on Friday, delighting throngs of skywatchers who flocked to see a total eclipse of the sun.

The stellar spectacle — which arises when the moon passes directly between the sun and Earth — began in northern Canada, tracked across Greenland and the Arctic, then moved through Russia and Mongolia.

The celestial display ended in western China, where some saw it as a dark omen ahead of next week's start of the Olympic Games in Beijing. Others, however, took a more contemporary view.

"These days, we don't think it's bad or lucky, it's just natural," said Joy Yang, who joined hundreds of people on the massive stone city wall in the ancient capital and Silk Road terminus now called Xi'an. The crowd broke into shouts and cheers during the total eclipse, which has been christened the "Olympics eclipse" by state media.

For more of this story and more about solar eclipses visit .

This report includes information from The Associated Press and Reuters.

We have several planets visible in the evening sky, and this is particularly appropriate because the Helena Symphony will be playing a piece entitled “The Planets” with narration by astronaut Buzz Aldrinat their annual symphony under the stars concert on Saturday.  This piece has amovement for each of the planets from Mercury toNeptune andthere will be telescopes available attheconcert, in case you want to take a look at the real thing as you listen tothe music.  Low in the western sky, you’ll beable to see the planets Mars and Saturn.  Saturn is a bit brighter than Mars right now, and the bright star Regulus, the heart of Leo the Lion is just down and to theright of both of them.

Over low in the Southeastern sky, the planet Jupiter will be rising at around10, and it’s amazingly bright right now, clearly the brightest object in the sky until the Moon comes up a few minutes later. 

Jupiter is an amazing object:  It is two and a half times more massive than all the rest of the planets combined.  Jupiter’s rocky core is 10 times the mass of the Earth,but its atmosphereis 300 times the mass of the Earth, which is why we call it a gas giant.  Deep insideJupiter, the intense pressure crushes its hydrogen gas into a liquid form that conductselectricity like a metal.  The churning and spinning of this liquid metallic hydrogen creates Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field, which is 14 times stronger than the Earth’s,and gives off powerful bursts of radio waves. 

Through a small telescope, you can see how Jupiter’s spin forces its thick clouds into belts that wrap East-West around the planet, like colossal jet streams of incredible intensity:  It’s a sight to see!

So take a look outside and enjoy the planets, tonight and on Saturday with music at the symphony under the stars, up in our beautiful Montana Skies!

We have a Crescent Moon out tonight low in the sky, over in the southwest.  To the right of the moon, you’ll find the planets Saturn and Mars, in the constellation Leo the Lion.  Each day this week, the Moon will grow a little thicker, and move a little farther over to the South, passing the bright star Spica, in the constellation Virgo by Thursday. 

The brightest star over here is Arcturus, which is very high up in the southwestern sky.  All stars are made of roughly 70% hydrogen gas and 30% heliumgas, the two lightest elements.

Our Sun is made of about 2% of the other elements:  Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, and all the other types of atoms make up about 2% of our Sun.  However the star Arcturus has a lot less of these other elements:  The heavy elements make up only about one half of one percent of Arcturus.  This tells us that Arcturus is a very ancient star, several billion years older than our Sun. 

At the very beginning, the big bang filled ouruniverse with hydrogen and helium and almost nothing else.  Stars create the heavier elements inside of them, and big stars are always exploding and adding more heavy elements to our universe.  When we find a star like Arcturus, with few of the heavy elements, this tells us that it must have formed in the distant past, closer to the big bang, before the stars had added more of the heavy elements to our universe.

The other really bright star out in the evening is Vega:  To find it, face directly East , and then look way up in the sky, almost straight overhead. To the left of Vega, and down just a little bit, you’ll find another bright star:

Deneb, at the tail of Cygnus the swan. 

As the evening progresses, you’ll find a fantastically bright object rising over in the southeast:  That’s the planet Jupiter which will be moving farther into the evening sky over the next few months.

So take a few minutes tonight, step outside, let your eyes adjust, and enjoy our beautiful Montana Skies!

Spica and Virgo - We’ve just passed the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, so if you want to see the stars, you have to wait up until almost 11:00.  If you look up high in the northwest sky, you’ll find the familiar sight of the big dipper, four stars in the bowl of the dipper and three stars in the handle.  If you follow the arc of the handle, you’ll come to the very bright star Arcturus, at the tip of the kite-shaped constellation Bootes the herdsman.  If we keep going, from the arc of the handle of the big dipper, through the star Arcturus, you’ll find the star Spica, in the constellation Virgo.  During the evening, Spica is the only bright star that is low in the southwest sky, and the body of Virgo extends off to the right, with the legs to the left.  The constellation Virgo is filled with galaxies:  With a small telescope, they look like tiny fuzzy patches.  But each one of those little fuzz balls is a whole galaxy like our Milky Way, a spiral disk containing hundreds of billions of stars.  Each one of those stars is a sun, and most of them probably have a solar system with planets and moons, comets and asteroids.  Astronomers have found so many galaxies up in the sky that we can tell that there are more stars in our universe than there are grains of sand on every beach on the face of the Earth!

Antares - If you look to the left of Spica and Virgo, you’ll find the equally bright star Antares low in the South.  Antares is the heart of Scorpius the scorpion, with claws extending up and to the right, and a curved tail dipping down below the horizon.  Antares is a red supergiant star, that puts out 10,000 times more light than our Sun, and it’s 600 light years away.  That means the light you can see from Antares has been traveling through space since before Columbus discovered America.  It’s a big universe!

So take advantage of these warm summer nights:  Stay up and enjoy our beautiful Montana skies!

If you look over in the western sky tonight, you’ll see a first quarter moon, along with the planets Saturn and Mars.  Saturn is to the right of the Moon, and it’s just a bit brighter than the star Regulus, which is to the lower right of Saturn.  NASA’s Cassini space probe, in orbit around Saturn, continues to make discoveries about this amazing system.  Cassini has discovered geysers of water erupting out of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.  The crust of this moon is made of ice, and astronomers think that underneath that frozen crust is a layer of liquid water, kept warm by friction, as gravity from Saturn’s other moons stretches and squeezes Enceladus.  If we understand things correctly, there has been an ocean of liquid water under the crust of that moon ever since the formation of the Sun, the Earth, and all the planets, four and a half billion years ago.  It didn’t take very long for simple life to form in the Earth’s oceans, so everyone is wondering just what might be going on in the oceans of Enceladus.  To the right of Saturn is the planet Mars, where NASA’s Phoenix probe landed, just two weeks ago.  This robotic laboratory is digging in the Martian soil, trying to learn about the history of water on Mars, and figure out whether it might be possible for anything to live in the ice-rich soil of the Martian arctic.

Over in the Eastern sky, you can find the very bright star Vega inching up, a little bit higher each day.  Vega is the brightest star in the small constellation Lyra, the lyre.  It’s a nearby star, just 25 light years from the Earth.  Vega is twice as massive as the Sun, but astronomers expect that it won’t last nearly as long as our Sun, because it’s burning its fuel so quickly.  As a result Vega will run out of gas when it reaches an age of just one billion years, while our Sun will probably live to a ripe old age of ten billion years.

So take a look outside tonight to see the Moon, Saturn, and Mars in the west, and the bright star Vega rising in the East, up in our beautiful Montana Skies!

Saturn, Mars and Arcturus -

Our evening sky has two planets over in the West:  The planet Saturn is right next to the bright star Regulus, the heart of Leo the Lion, which is a bit less bright than Saturn.  The head of the lion extends above and to the right of Regulus, while the body is up and to the left. 

If you look to the right, you’ll find the planet Mars among the very faint stars of Cancer the Crab, and another step to the right brings us to the twin stars of Gemini, Pollux and Castor.

If you look very high up in the sky, almost straight up, you’ll find the familiar stars of the Big Dipper, three stars in the handle and four stars that make up the bowl of the dipper.  If you follow the arc of the handle away from the dipper, you’ll find the very bright star Arcturus, high overhead. 

Arcturus is in the constellation Bootes, the herdsman, which is sort of a kit shape, with Arcturus at the point. This star is so bright because it is one of the closest stars to the Earth, only 37 light years away.  So when you see this bright star, you are seeing light that was given off back in 1971, and has traveled through space to reach your eye for the past 37 years. 

Arcturus is close and so like our Sun, it is within what we call the local interstellar cloud, a cloud of gas that our solar system is slowly moving through.  The space between the stars is not completely empty, and has a few atoms in every cubic inch.  That’s not very much compared to density of our atmosphere here on Earth, but space is really really big, and so even a few atoms per cubic inch can make a difference.  This is the material that new stars are born from.  Over millions of years, the force of gravity can gather together enough of those atoms until you have an object so large, so dense, and so hot in the center that nuclear reactions will start, and cause a new star to be born.

So, if the sky clears off, step outside, and see Saturn, Mars, and Arcturus, up in our beautiful Montana Skies!