The Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules. Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey

The globular cluster considered by most to be the best of its kind in the northern hemisphere is M13 in Hercules, also known as the Great Hercules Cluster. At magnitude 5.9, M13 can be seen without optical aid from dark-sky sites. But binoculars or a telescope vastly improves the view.

M13 is not hard to find. The first step is to find the constellation Hercules, which will be in the west this weekend after it gets dark. The main part of the constellation is called the keystone and almost looks like an isosceles trapezoid. The two stars lower down that make the base are closer together than the two stars on top. On the right side of this keystone is where M13 lies. Draw an imaginary line from the top right side star to the bottom right side star, and one-third of the way down this line lies M13.

Through optical aid, M13 will look like a fuzzy patch with small stars just to its upper and lower left. (Or right, if you’re looking through a telescope.) Even though M13 is much farther away from neighboring stars, I find that it seems to pop out from the background due to its blurred appearance.

M13 lies more than 25,000 light-years away. As a globular cluster, M13 is a gravitationally bound conglomeration of thousands and thousands of stars that orbits its parent galaxy. While globular clusters are no longer seen as likely locations for extraterrestrial life to reside, in 1974 the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico blasted an encoded message into space aimed at M13. We have yet to receive a reply.

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Kelly Kizer Whitt loves clean, clear, and dark skies. Kelly studied English and Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked for Astronomy magazine. She is currently the Feature Writer for Astronomy and Space at Suite101.com. You can follow her on Twitter attwitter.com/Astronomommy

An ear of corn. We can see it in our mind's eye: the opalescent kernels, the raspy, coarse leaves...we choose an ear by weighing it in a hand, hoping the heaviest ear is the tastiest. The last of the corn is in here in Maryland, the season ending with the delicious Silver Queen. It takes over 90 days for the white-kerneled Silver Queen to mature, with some cobs measuring over 12". New England has Butter and Sugar, a yellow and white heirloom and, in early August the tiny, tender Delectable, but the massive ears of Silver Queen have a gravitas that the others lack.

I so loved one ear that I couldn't bear to cook it. I started to: I peeled back a few leaves, touched the shiny kernels, thought of the meal it would make...but I decided I wanted to remember it in its perfect state, unhusked. I set it on the dining room table to draw. I opened my sketchbook and took out a thick, dark 4B pencil which somehow matched my excitement. I knew I would be tempted to draw every little kernel, so I drew fast. I didn't want to get stuck in the perfect rendering of every little shape, I wanted to capture the essence of corn. So my first contour drawing was messy:

But the first drawing helped me understand the shapes that make up corn. By the second, I knew I wanted the kernels to star. But how to set off their pale yellowness? Not with realistic green, but with their complement across the color wheel, red-violet. Matisse and the Fauvists angered the European art world with their use of complements back in the early 1900s: red against green, yellow against purple, but 100 years later, our eyes revel in the vibrations of complements. I drew the ear a second time, added a light watercolor wash, and went over the drawing with colored pencils.

The New York Times has just begun a blog on the art of drawing. The artist, James McMullan, is is currently working on a series of theatrical posters for Lincoln Center in NYC. You can find it here.

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Sue Fierston paints and teaches just outside of Washington, D.C. in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. As a painter, she works in acrylics and watercolor and is in the middle of a series called "100 Flowers." As a teaching artist, she works with teachers to bring art into their classrooms in grades 4-8. Her posts focus on her nature-themed art collaborations. For a look at her paintings or more about her teaching, check out her website at suzannefierston.com.

September 22 brings the fall equinox and the first day of autumn for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. Every day at sunset we’ve watched the sun reach a point on the horizon farther south than it was the day before. On the equinoxes, the sun sets directly west (and rises directly east). The sun will continue to set farther south every evening (and set earlier, too, because it’s cutting a shorter path across the sky) until it reaches its point farthest south on the horizon and the winter solstice occurs.

September’s full moon is called the Harvest Moon and it hits peak fullness at 2:17 a.m. PDT on September 23, about six hours after the equinox. The nights around the full moon are never good for stargazing because of the moon’s brilliance. During full phase, the moon shines at magnitude -12.6, washing out nearby nebulae, galaxies, and stars. But full moon is a good time to enjoy the outdoors later into the evening, and as the cool autumn air creeps in, it may be your last chance for a few months to walk while the moon is full.

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Kelly Kizer Whitt loves clean, clear, and dark skies. Kelly studied English and Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked for Astronomy magazine. She is currently the Feature Writer for Astronomy and Space at Suite101.com. You can follow her on Twitter attwitter.com/Astronomommy

On Maryland's Eastern Shore, oyster shells are so common they are used for mulch. These shells came from a flowerbed at the Tilghman Island Inn, which overlooks the Chesapeake Bay. I painted them in a flash, at 10 PM, sitting on my bed, propping them up with my knee on the bedspread. I painted them during my first watercolor workshop, in the evening, when the day's lessons remained so strong in my mind I felt compelled to keep painting without the teacher.

Twelve years later, this remains one of my favorites; I can still feel the weight of the flat, wavy shells in my hands. The idea of painting around the shells, instead of painting the shells themselves, is the lesson I took from that workshop. In watercolor, the white of the paper is everything.

A different shore, a different shell. Mussels coat the rocks of the colder New England coast, the oysters were fished out long ago. With their iridescent blue shells, mussels would make a lovely mulch too, if we ate them in any quantity. In New England, though, people prefer the milder clam: little necks and cherry stones and dig your own if you can find a bed. (Or go to the Clam Box in Ipswich, Massachusetts if you're traveling along the coast north of Boston...yes, it's worth waiting in line!)

I used Daniel Smith iridescent paint on this shell, and you can see its grayish sparkle in the upper left corner and in the sand. I also outlined the shell with a fine point water soluble marker before the painting dried--I like the bleeding of the marker into the paint.

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Sue Fierston paints and teaches just outside of Washington, D.C. in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. As a painter, she works in acrylics and watercolor and is in the middle of a series called "100 Flowers." As a teaching artist, she works with teachers to bring art into their classrooms in grades 4-8. Her posts focus on her nature-themed art collaborations. For a look at her paintings or more about her teaching, check out her website at suzannefierston.com.

An imager on the New Horizons spacecraft captured this shot of Jupiter while 181 million miles from the giant planet. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Jupiter is a great observing target for all of September. It rises in the east after sunset and is unmistakable as a brilliant yellowish disk among the stars of Pisces. Jupiter’s four largest moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, are large enough and bright enough to be seen with only a steadily held pair of binoculars. Each night you look, you should notice that the moons have changed their locations as they orbit the planet. Sometimes not all moons will be visible as they pass in front of and behind Jupiter.

Through a telescope Jupiter shows its cloud tops, with one dark belt being more pronounced than the rest of the planet. How much you can see on Jupiter depends on the size and quality of your telescope, plus the seeing conditions in your area. Atmospheric conditions such as wind can make it impossible to get a good view of anything but a blurry orb.

On September 20, Jupiter will reach a distance of 3.95 astronomical units, or 368 million miles, from Earth. This puts the giant planet at its closest to us for the next 12 years. The next night, September 21, Jupiter reaches opposition, when it is opposite from the sun in our sky, meaning that it is visible all night.

Anyone attempting to catch Jupiter through a telescope this month gets a big bonus as Uranus is about a degree away. Uranus has been floating close to Jupiter for a while and will continue to do so for months to come, as they slowly separate and then come back together.

This weekend when the skies are dark (new moon was on Wednesday), you can look for Uranus through any small telescope. Uranus shines at magnitude 5.8 and looks a lot like a dim star. Its placement near an obvious “landmark” such as Jupiter is what helps you know that you’re seeing the correct object.

This weekend and for the coming two weeks, the two planets are about one degree apart. Uranus is above Jupiter and just a little to the right this weekend, but by next weekend Uranus will still be above but a little to Jupiter’s left. Remember that through a telescope the view is inverted, showing Uranus below the planet. Toward the end of the month the two planets will seem to distance themselves a bit, and this will continue to be the case until December, when the two begin to draw near each other once more.

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Kelly Kizer Whitt loves clean, clear, and dark skies. Kelly studied English and Astronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and worked for Astronomy magazine. She is currently the Feature Writer for Astronomy and Space at Suite101.com. You can follow her on Twitter at twitter.com/Astronomommy

The constellation Ophiuchus contains seven globular clusters with Messier designations, including this one, M9. Credit: AURA/NSF/NOAO

Summer is drawing to a close here in the Northern Hemisphere, and with it the summer constellations are disappearing from view. Ophiuchus is one of the constellations setting in the southwestern sky: Get out and observe it while you can.

Ophiuchus is a unique constellation in that it lies in the plane of the ecliptic, yet it is not counted as one of the traditional zodiacal constellations. Ophiuchus lies between Sagittarius to its lower left with its telltale teapot shape, and the curving form of Scorpius with its bright and reddish star Antares, which lies below and to the right of Ophiuchus.

The constellation of Ophiuchus is supposed to represent a serpent bearer. The snake that Ophiuchus is holding lies on either side of him and is named Serpens. The main stars in Ophiuchus range from magnitude 2.0 to 3.3, and the nine brightest form a difficult-to-decipher form of a man with his legs toward the southern horizon.

Because of Ophiuchus’s location along the edge of the Milky Way and near the center of the galaxy (which is located in the direction of its neighbor Sagittarius), it contains a large number of globular clusters. Globular clusters are massive groupings of stars, like miniature satellite galaxies, that orbit around the core of the galaxy. The Milky Way has more than 100 globular clusters located in its halo that formed along with its parent galaxy; thus, globular clusters are some of the oldest stars that can be observed. Stars in globular clusters are called Population II stars and have very low amounts of metal.

The seven globular clusters named by Charles Messier in Ophiuchus are:

· M9

· M10

· M12

· M14

· M19

· M62

· M107

All the globular clusters are between magnitudes 6.6 and 8.1, which should be within reach of binoculars or a small telescope from a dark-sky site.

For more information on how to locate these ancient star clusters, read the article about Ophiuchus and use this constellation map.

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