What's up right now - June 2026
June delivers some of the most spectacular skywatching of the year from outback Queensland. Two of the brightest planets in the solar system are putting on a show that hasn't been matched in years, the winter sky deepens and darkens, and the heart of our own galaxy rises high above the Charleville horizon. With the June solstice bringing our longest night on the 21st, there has never been a better time to step outside and look up.
The sky event of the year
In May we watched Venus drifting steadily eastward through the twilight, closing in on brilliant Jupiter night after night. This month, they finally meet.
On the evenings of June 8 and 9, Venus and Jupiter, the two brightest planets visible from Earth, appear closer together in the sky than at any other time this year. They will be separated by less than half a degree, close enough that both planets fit inside a single binocular field of view. Look northwest in the half hour after sunset and you simply cannot miss them: a brilliant double beacon hanging above the horizon, blazing against the twilight.
Venus shines at magnitude -4.5, roughly twice as bright as any star in the sky. Jupiter glows steadily at magnitude -2.1. Together they are unmistakable. And through even a modest telescope, the view becomes extraordinary. The crescent phase of Venus is visible on one side. Jupiter's disc, complete with cloud bands and up to four of its Galilean moons, is visible on the other. Both fit in the same eyepiece at the same time.
The conjunction rewards watching across the whole first half of the month. The gap between the two planets slowly closes, reaches its minimum on June 9, then gradually widens again, each evening a slightly different pairing. And on June 17, the thin crescent Moon joins them in the northwest sky alongside Mercury to complete one of the most striking four-object lineups of the year.
Best viewing time: Look northwest about 30 minutes after sunset. Venus and Jupiter are bright enough to be visible even in the lingering twilight. Binoculars will show both in the same field of view. A telescope will reveal the crescent phase of Venus and Jupiter's disc side by side, which is genuinely extraordinary.
Venus
Venus commands the evening sky all month, blazing in the northwest after sunset as the brightest object in the sky after the Moon. At magnitude -4.5 it punches through haze and thin cloud that would hide any other planet, and on evenings when the twilight is still glowing pink and gold, Venus is already there, impossible to overlook.
Through a telescope it is a rewarding and sometimes surprising target. Early in June Venus shows a small, nearly full disc. But as it sweeps closer to us in its orbit across the month, the disc grows larger while the illuminated portion narrows into a thinner crescent, giving it a horned silhouette that consistently stops first-time observers in their tracks.
Venus is a planet of extremes. Shrouded beneath thick, unbroken clouds of sulfuric acid, its surface bakes at around 465 degrees Celsius day and night, hot enough to melt lead. Those same clouds that make it so brilliant in our sky trap heat so effectively that Venus is actually hotter than Mercury, despite sitting twice as far from the Sun.
Jupiter
Jupiter holds court alongside Venus in the northwest evening sky throughout June, a steady brilliant white point whose position relative to Venus shifts noticeably from night to night. Through a telescope its equatorial cloud bands are visible on any clear night, and the four Galilean moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, shuffle their positions in a dance that is different every time you look.
Jupiter is the undisputed heavyweight of our solar system. More than twice as massive as every other planet combined, it hosts a storm in its atmosphere wider than the Earth that has been raging for centuries. Its magnetic field is the strongest of any planet. And with 95 known moons, it is effectively a miniature solar system in its own right.
By month's end, Jupiter sinks a little lower toward the horizon as Earth moves on in its orbit, but for now it remains a fine evening target and a fitting companion for Venus throughout June.
Mercury
June offers one of the best opportunities of the year to spot Mercury, the solar system's smallest and most elusive planet. On June 15, Mercury reaches greatest eastern elongation, its widest apparent separation from the Sun, making it easier to find in the evening twilight than at almost any other time.
Look for it low on the northwestern horizon, below Venus and Jupiter, in the half hour after sunset. Binoculars will help considerably, since Mercury tends to lurk in the brightest part of the twilight glow. It moves quickly, its position shifting noticeably from night to night, and by late June it has drifted closer to Jupiter with the two appearing near each other on the evening of June 25.
Mercury is a world of brutal extremes. With almost no atmosphere to retain or distribute heat, temperatures swing from -180 degrees Celsius on the night side to over 430 degrees during the day. Its surface is ancient and heavily cratered, a record of billions of years of impacts largely unchanged since the early solar system. Most people have never spotted it. This month is your chance.
Saturn
Saturn is the early riser of June, climbing steadily higher in the pre-dawn eastern sky as the month progresses. Look east from around 4 a.m. and you will find its distinctly warm yellow-white glow well above the horizon. A small telescope reveals the rings immediately, tilted toward us this year at an angle that shows off their full breadth and beauty. Mars sits nearby, noticeably lower on the horizon, with a reddish tinge that provides a pleasant colour contrast to Saturn's cooler tone.
The Southern Cross remains one of the most prominent objects in the June sky, riding high in the south through the long winter nights alongside the brilliant Pointer stars, Alpha and Beta Centauri. It is impossible to miss and serves as a reliable reference point for the whole sky.
The Cross is a compact diamond of four main stars with a fifth offset slightly to one side. Its long axis, extended about four and a half times its own length, points almost directly to the South Celestial Pole, making it one of the most practically useful constellations in the southern sky. Unlike the Northern Hemisphere, the southern sky has no bright pole star, and the Southern Cross has guided navigators across the southern seas for centuries because of it.
Crux sits in one of the richest regions of the Milky Way, and the contrast between its glittering stars and the dark, inky void of the Coalsack Nebula beside it is striking with the naked eye alone. The Coalsack is a dense cloud of interstellar dust that blocks the stars behind it, carving a deep black patch out of the star fields. For many Aboriginal Australian peoples, the dark spaces in the Milky Way are just as meaningful as the bright stars. The Coalsack forms part of a tradition of dark constellation storytelling, where shapes are defined by darkness rather than light, a way of reading the sky that is unique to this part of the world and one of the most profound astronomy traditions on Earth.
Centaurus still rides high in the south in June, carrying with it two of the most brilliant stars in the entire sky. Alpha and Beta Centauri, the famous Pointer stars, blaze in the south and serve as the most reliable guide to the Southern Cross for anyone learning the sky.
Alpha Centauri deserves special attention. To the naked eye it appears as a single brilliant star, but it is actually a triple star system. Two main stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, orbit each other over an 80-year cycle, while the third component, Proxima Centauri, is a faint red dwarf that holds the distinction of being the single closest star to our Sun at just 4.24 light-years. The light reaching your eyes from Proxima left that star just over four years ago. Of all the stars in the sky, this is our nearest neighbour.
In Greek mythology, Centaurus represents Chiron, the wisest of all centaurs and tutor to the greatest heroes of the ancient world, among them Achilles, Jason, and Hercules. Where his kind were notorious for chaos and violence, Chiron was renowned for knowledge, medicine, and music. His story ends in tragedy; accidentally wounded by one of Hercules’ poisoned arrows and unable to die due to his immortality, he ultimately chose to give up that immortality to free the Titan Prometheus. Zeus, moved by the sacrifice, placed him among the stars for eternity.
The archer and the heart of the galaxy
Following Scorpius across the winter sky is Sagittarius, the archer centaur of Greek mythology, his bow drawn eternally toward the scorpion in a standoff that has lasted across millennia of human storytelling.
But Sagittarius holds something even more remarkable than mythology. It points directly toward the centre of our own galaxy. When you look at Sagittarius from Charleville on a clear June night, you are looking toward the very heart of the Milky Way, roughly 26,000 light-years away, where a supermassive black hole four million times the mass of our Sun sits at the galactic core.
The most recognisable shape in Sagittarius is not the archer himself but the Teapot, an asterism of eight stars forming an unmistakable kettle shape that is easy to find once you know it. On a moonless night it appears as though steam is rising from the Teapot's spout, drifting upward into the sky. That steam is actually the densest concentration of the Milky Way; star clouds and nebulae so packed together they form a glowing river of light.
Within Sagittarius lies one of the most extraordinary collections of deep-sky objects anywhere in the sky. The Lagoon Nebula (M8) is visible to the naked eye as a glowing patch of the Milky Way, a vast cloud of ionised hydrogen lit from within by newly born stars. The Trifid Nebula (M20), just a degree away, is divided into three lobes by dark dust lanes that give it its name and make it one of the more visually striking telescopic objects in the southern sky. The Omega Nebula (M17), also known as the Swan Nebula, is one of the brightest and most active star-forming regions in the entire galaxy. Point a telescope almost anywhere into this part of the sky and you are overwhelmed.
In ancient times, the night sky told the stories of those who dared to explore the unknown and none were bolder than the crew of the Argo.
Carina represents the keel of the Argo, the legendary ship that carried the hero Jason and his Argonauts on their epic quest for the Golden Fleece. The Argo was said to be the greatest ship ever built, constructed with the help of the goddess Athena herself, who placed a magical piece of timber in its hull that could speak and prophesy.
The constellation was once part of a much larger constellation called Argo Navis — the entire ship — until astronomers divided it into three parts: the keel, the sails, and the stern. Carina kept the most precious cargo, the brightest star of the old ship, Canopus. Shining at magnitude -0.7, Canopus is the second brightest star in the entire night sky, outshone only by Sirius. For centuries, navigators used it to guide their ships across the southern seas, just as Jason once trusted the Argo to carry him across uncharted waters.
But Carina holds far more than just Canopus. Hidden within its borders is the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372), one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the entire sky, a vast stellar nursery over 300 light-years wide where thousands of new stars are being born. Visible to the naked eye as a glowing patch of the Milky Way, it is truly breathtaking through binoculars or a telescope. Lurking within it is Eta Carinae, one of the most massive and unstable stars known to science, a ticking cosmic time bomb that astronomers believe could explode as a supernova at virtually any time. Also look for the stunning Southern Pleiades (IC 2602) — a sparkling open cluster of young blue stars that rivals its famous northern namesake, and the Diamond Cluster (NGC 3532), one of the finest open clusters in the southern sky, so spectacular that it was the very first object ever observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Leo is still visible in the early evening western sky in June, but it is sinking steadily toward the horizon and is best caught in the first hour or two after dark. By late June it sits quite low in the west, so earlier in the month gives the better view.
Few constellations have commanded human attention across cultures quite like Leo, one of the oldest recognised star patterns in history, dating back over 6,000 years. In Greek mythology it represents the Nemean Lion, a monstrous beast whose hide no weapon could pierce, terrorising the region of Nemea until Hercules wrestled it bare-handed as the very first of his Twelve Labours. Zeus placed the lion among the stars to honour its ferocity.
The most recognisable feature of Leo is the Sickle, a reverse question mark shape of stars forming the lion’s mane and head, with the bright star Regulus marking its base. Regulus sits almost precisely on the ecliptic, the path the Sun, Moon, and planets trace across the sky throughout the year, which is why it was one of the most closely observed stars in ancient astronomy across many cultures. At the lion’s hindquarters shines Denebola, meaning "the lion’s tail" in Arabic, while Algieba, despite appearing as a single star to the naked eye, is revealed through a telescope to be a stunning pair of golden binary stars slowly orbiting each other.
For those with telescopes, the Leo Triplet (M65, M66, and NGC 3628) remains accessible in the early evening, three spiral galaxies around 35 million light-years away visible in the same field of view through a modest instrument. Observe them early while Leo is still at a reasonable height.
Nestled right beside the Southern Cross, the Jewel Box is one of the most spectacular and colourful star clusters in the entire southern sky and one of the great rewards for those who look just a little closer.
Located around 6,400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Crux, the Jewel Box is a young, bright open cluster containing around 100 stars packed into a region of space just 20 light-years across, making it one of the most concentrated and brilliant open clusters visible from the southern hemisphere. It was given its sparkling name by the great astronomer John Herschel, who described it as a piece of jewellery when he observed it from South Africa in the 1830s.
What makes the Jewel Box truly breathtaking through a telescope is its extraordinary colour contrast. Most of its stars are young, hot, brilliant blue-white supergiants but scattered among them are a handful of vivid red and orange supergiants, creating a stunning visual contrast that looks almost too beautiful to be real. The brightest member, Kappa Crucis, is a deep red supergiant that blazes like a ruby set among sapphires. The cluster is estimated to be only around 14 million years old; a mere infant by cosmic standards, born long after the dinosaurs walked the Earth.
The Jewel Box sits in one of the richest regions of the Milky Way, surrounded by the dark Coalsack Nebula, a dense, inky cloud of dust that blocks the stars behind it, creating a striking dark void right beside the Southern Cross that has captivated stargazers and storytellers for thousands of years. To Aboriginal Australians, the Coalsack is part of a rich tradition of dark constellation storytelling; where the shapes are defined not by stars, but by the dark spaces between them.
If there is one object in the night sky that truly stops people in their tracks, that makes jaws drop and eyes widen, it is Omega Centauri. And from Charleville's dark outback skies, you have one of the finest views of it anywhere on Earth.
Sitting within the constellation Centaurus, Omega Centauri is the largest and most massive globular cluster in the entire Milky Way galaxy; a titanic ball of stars so large and so ancient it defies easy comprehension. It lies approximately 17,000 light-years from Earth, and yet it is still visible to the naked eye as a faint, fuzzy star; the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy actually catalogued it as a star, completely unaware of what it truly was.
Look closer and the truth is staggering. Omega Centauri contains somewhere between 10 million and 12 million stars — all gravitationally bound together in a sphere roughly 150 light-years in diameter. Many of its stars are among the oldest in the known universe, estimated at around 12 billion years old — formed when the universe itself was still young, long before our own solar system even existed. If you were a planet orbiting a star near the centre of Omega Centauri, your night sky would be ablaze with tens of thousands of stars so close and bright that true darkness would never fall.
Some astronomers believe Omega Centauri may not be a globular cluster at all — but rather the stripped core of a dwarf galaxy that was consumed by the Milky Way billions of years ago, its outer stars torn away, leaving only this impossibly dense and ancient heart behind. It even appears to harbour a black hole at its centre.
Through the telescopes here at the Cosmos Centre, Omega Centauri reveals itself as a breathtaking swarm of ancient stars — growing denser and denser toward the centre, like looking into the heart of another world entirely.
Our galaxy, seen from within
June is arguably the finest month of the year to experience the Milky Way from Charleville, and that is saying something given the extraordinary quality of this sky year-round.
As darkness falls in June, the Milky Way stretches from horizon to horizon in a breathtaking arc. The Galactic Centre, the densest and most luminous region of our galaxy, rises in the southeast and climbs toward overhead through the night. By midnight it blazes through Sagittarius and Scorpius in a sweep of light that, under truly dark skies, casts a faint but real shadow.
What you are looking at is our home galaxy, seen edge-on from within. A disc of roughly 200 to 400 billion stars, approximately 100,000 light-years across, and we sit about two-thirds of the way out from the centre. The bright core glowing above Charleville is the crowded inner galaxy, where stars are packed so tightly their combined light merges into luminous clouds. The dark patches threading through it are not gaps in the stars but vast clouds of dust blocking the light behind them.
From a truly dark site like Charleville, the Milky Way is not a faint smear. It is a physical, three-dimensional structure you can feel depth in, packed with texture, colour, and dark lanes of shadow. This is one of the things that makes Charleville genuinely special. Most Australians have never seen the sky like this.
On June 21, the winter solstice arrives for the Southern Hemisphere. Earth's south pole reaches its maximum tilt away from the Sun, giving us our shortest day and our longest night of the year. From Charleville, darkness falls early and holds for close to 13 hours.
For astronomers and stargazers it is a gift. More darkness means more time for planets, nebulae, and galaxies to move across the sky, more time for the eyes to dark-adapt and pull detail from faint objects, and more opportunity for the kind of quiet, unhurried sky-watching that dark outback nights are made for.
Cultures across the world have marked the solstice for thousands of years. For many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the movements of the Sun, Moon, and stars carried profound seasonal and cultural meaning, and the changing arc of the Sun through the sky across the year was tracked and understood across countless generations. The night sky was not simply backdrop but a living record of time, season, and story.
After June 21, the nights slowly begin to shorten. But the winter sky remains rich and deep well into August, and for now, on the longest night of the year, the universe above Charleville is offering everything it has got.