Pluto transits before midnight

Event Date: July 19th
Time: 11:47(.42) PM


Brief

   At this time of year for the next few decades, Pluto is at, or near transit in the late evening hours.  With a revolution period of about 248 years, as a result of being a mean distance of over 3 billion miles of the Sun and Earth, summer evenings for the northern hemisphere are the time to try to find the dwarf planet, at magnitude 14.
   First, is a zoom-out showing Pluto not far from the galactic center in northern Sagittarius.  Its interesting orbit, inclined 17º from the ecliptic is shown as well, reminding us of a main reason of Pluto's demotion back in 2006.  The celestial equator and ecliptic are presented to show that Pluto is still far south and low for viewing from our latitude, despite a good ecliptic latitude of 3.8º.

Detailed

  A telescope of 12" or larger is recommended to see Pluto any bigger than just a pinpoint, helping gather enough light to still magnify up to 5-600x.  A telescope too small, such as 8" may still help find it, although it will be very difficult to differentiate from stars of the same magnitude. 
   The light reflected from Pluto to our eyes takes a little less than 5 hours to reach our eyes.  Thinking that the light from our Moon takes only a little over a second, that makes it even more interesting that Pluto (being smaller than Moon) can still reflect enough light for us to see from here, granted that optical aid is required.
The second image shows a zoom-in of about 500x as mentioned above, to further show that only the most powerful of telescopes easily pick up detail of Pluto's surface, which is all but featureless.

click on images to enlarge: courtesy of Starry Night Pro Plus, version 6.4.3, by Simulation Curriculum Corp.