People who move to Southwest Florida from up north often say that they miss the changing of the seasons because weather here is always the same.
Meteorologically speaking, however, Southwest Florida has two distinct seasons: The dry season, which runs from Nov. 1 through May 31, and the rainy season, June 1 through Oct. 31.
Obviously, the defining characteristic of the rainy season is rain, and rain means clouds, and clouds mean bad news for astronomers because we don’t want to haul our telescopes outside or open our home observatories to look at overcast skies.
But not every night during the rainy season is cloudy and overcast skies can have breaks. If you want to continue observing during our least astronomy-friendly five months, keep a pair of binoculars handy and seek out these upcoming celestial targets:
• The Hercules Cluster (M13). This is one of the most spectacular of the 160 known globular clusters. Located in the constellation Hercules, it’s 25,000 light years from Earth and made up of 100,000 closely packed stars. In addition to being great binocular targets, globular clusters are fascinating objects. In a sky full of stars, they are the movie stars, and they’re very old – 12 to 13 billion years old, compared to Earth’s 4.5 billion years. You can imagine one globular cluster saying to another, “We can remember when Earth was a whippersnapper.”
