It's a beautiful sparrow, with fine dark lines streaking across a buff-colored breast.  The sides of the face are gray.  Although all sightings on a bird count wind up as numbers on a list, all bird sightings are not equal.  Most enjoyable are views of birds where you can really savor the beauty of the bird.  We had long uninterrupted views of the Lincoln's Sparrow, and watched it sing several times.  Even better, it stayed in the vicinity while I returned to our truck and got my recording setup and camera.  I thought my image taking was over when it flew across the trail near the base of a rock wall in some high grass, but just before I headed back it hopped back up on a branch about 15 feet away, and I got the image above.

Lincoln's Sparrows are an uncommon migrant in Tennessee, and I always feel very fortunate to enjoy the beauty of this bird and its song.  Sparrows were one of the toughest groups of birds for me to learn, but they are among the groups that now bring me the most enjoyment.  Their subtle but beautiful colors and intricate songs make any morning better.

Sky Events for May 2016:

Never look at the Sun without proper protection for you eyes.  The small apparent size of Mercury on the Sun's face (see the image at right that we took during the 2006 transit) means that you will definitely need a telescope to see the transit.  Even the briefest of looks through a telescope without a solar filter in place is enough to permanently damage your eye and even cause blindness.  Always use a tight-fitting solar filter that fits in front of your objective lens or mirror.  Never leave a telescope trained on the Sun unattended in a public setting.

Jupiter is in Leo this month.  Look for it about 58 degrees above the southwest horizon at dusk as the month begins.  This month is a great time to see Jupiter and its cloud belts.  If you steady your binoculars on something solid, you can often pick out several of the four Galilean satellites of Jupiter close to the planet.  With a telescope, you can often glimpse some details in the clouds.  These details change rapidly, and the details can look different from night to night.  It's also fun to watch the Galilean satellites transit across the face of the planet, or be eclipsed by the planet's shadow. 

Mars is in Scorpius as the month begins, rising about 9:27pm CDT.  The planet's apparent diameter is growing larger as we near its closest approach to Earth on May 30th.  At the beginning of the month it's 16 arc-seconds in diameter, but grows to 18.6 arc-seconds by month's end.  This means that Mars will appear larger than it has in a decade. 

Mars is always fascinating to view, but it takes patience to wait for the moments when the Earth's atmosphere steadies.  The darker areas change shape slowly over time, and the fainter detail can be maddeningly difficult to make out.  And of course Mars has a history of being a trickster in that regard.

The first of the illusory Martian "canals" appeared on maps created by the Italian astronomer Geovanni Schiaparelli in 1877.  Schiaparelli called these features channels (Italian "canali") and was neutral on whether they were natural features or something constructed by intelligent beings.  Others, particularly Percival Lowell, saw the linear features as an indication of intelligent life on Mars.  A whole world view developed in which Mars was a dying planet, where heroic Martian engineers struggled to convey water from the poles down to the deserts that covered most of the planet.  In subsequent maps the canals became much more numerous, much straighter.  Some were drawn as double canals, and many oases were drawn where the canals met.

Of course, not every astronomer viewing the planet saw the canals.  Nathanial Green did not show them in his excellent map of 1877.  Tellingly, the eagle-eyed Edward Emerson Barnard, one of greatest observers of all time, did not see them.  He wrote, "I have been watching and drawing the surface of Mars.  It is wonderfully full of detail.  There is certainly no question about there being mountains and large, greatly elevated plateaus.  To save my soul, I can't believe in the canals as Schiaparelli draws them.  I see details where he has drawn none....I verily believe, for all the verifications...that the canals as depicted by Schiaparelli are a fallacy and that they will be proved so before many oppositions are past."

But the belief in intelligent life on Mars became widespread.  Perhaps its peak came around the end of the19th century.  In 1891, the Pierre Guzman prize of 100,000 French francs was established, to be awarded to the first person to communicate with a celestial body, and to receive a response.  The planet Mars was exempted from the award, as it was thought not to represent enough of a challenge!

As the 20th century went on, the canals were met with more and more skepticism.  The final nails in the coffin were the Mariner missions to Mars.  Mariner 4 flew by Mars on July 14th and 15th, 1965.  Craters were visible on the planet's surface.  On seeing the images, science fiction author Isaac Asimov reportedly said to Frederik Pohl, "Craters?  Why didn't we think of craters?"

Mariner 9 was the first spacecraft to orbit another planet, and it was the first to show the surface of Mars well.  Before the spacecraft reached Mars, Carl Sagan was in a panel discussion and talked about the Martian canals.  Sagan, a skeptic, made a comment that summed up the whole canal controversy; "There is no question that the straightness of the lines is due to intelligence.  The only question concerns which side of the telescope the intelligence is on."

But the planet still seems to have a pull on me.  Schiaparelli's nomenclature for the surface features, though altered somewhat, is beautiful and still used today.  He named the surface features after features on maps of the ancient Earth.  Greek myths abound.  I once saw a small dark area on Mars called Nodus Alcyonius.  I found that the name referred to the legend of Alcyone and Ceyx in Ovid.  That led me to kingfishers, and back to our Belted Kingfisher, Ceryle Alcyon.  Since, I've never looked at a kingfisher dropping off a branch and flying along the water's surface, calling, in quite the same way.

And Schiaparelli did make some amazing observations.  He named one frequently occurring white spot on Mars, "Nix Olympica" (translation, Olympic Snow).  He noted that even when most of the other features of the planet were hidden by dust storms, Nix Olympica could still be seen.  As it turns out, he was viewing the wave clouds that form over the feature now known as Olympus Mons, the highest mountain in the solar system.

Constellations:  The views below show the sky looking east at 9:30pm CDT on May 15th.  The first view shows the sky with the constellation outlined and names depicted.  Star and planet names are in green.  Constellation names are in blue.  The second view shows the same scene without labels.  A sure sign that spring is here is the rising of the bright blue-white star Vega in the early evening.  Vega is the brightest star in Lyra, the Lyre, and it shines like a diamond in a small telescope.  Look low in the southeast for brilliant Mars to rise, followed by Saturn and Antares.  Antares means, "rival of Mars," but Mars will be much brighter than Antares this month as the Earth and Mars draw close.  As spring progresses and Hercules rises higher in the sky, look for the globular cluster Messier 13 (M13), which appears like a small fuzzy patch of light about 1/3 of the distance from Eta to Zeta Hercules (see illustration below).  A cluster of stars about 21,000 light years away, M13 can be made out with the naked eye in a dark country sky when the constellation is high in the sky.  Binoculars will help pick it out. 

Recommended:

Sky & Telescope's Pocket Star Atlas is beautiful, compact star atlas. 

A good book to learn the constellations is Patterns in the Sky, by Hewitt-White.  You may also want to check out at H. A. Rey's classic, The Stars, A New Way to See Them.

For skywatching tips, an inexpensive good guide is Secrets of Stargazing, by Becky Ramotowski. 

A good general reference book on astronomy is the Peterson Field Guide, A Field Guide to the Stars and Planets, by Pasachoff.  The book retails for around $14.00. 

The Virtual Moon Atlas is a terrific way to learn the surface features of the Moon.  And it's free software.  You can download the Virtual Moon Atlas here.

Cartes du Ciel (described in the monthly notes above) is a great program for finding your way around the sky.  It is also free, and can be downloaded here.

Apps:  We really love the Sky Safari Pro application described here.  For upcoming events, the Sky Week application is quite nice.  Both apps are available for both I-phone and Android operating systems.  The newest version, Sky Safari 4, is available here.

Another great app is the Photographer's Ephemeris.  Great for finding sunrise, moonrise, sunset and moonset times and the precise place on the horizon that the event will occur.  Invaluable not only for planning photographs, but also nice to plan an outing to watch the full moon rise.  Available for both androids and iOS.