Views from our bedroom windows

Looking north from our bedroom window, after midnight last night, I noticed the first display of noctilucent clouds  that I have seen this year.

Bearing in mind; the terrible electrical storm, hail and torrential rain, that we had experienced during the day, last night was exceptionally clear, as is often the case after rain, and many stars were visible in the astronomical twilight, which continued into the early hours of the morning.

Night clouds or noctilucent clouds are tenuous cloud-like phenomena that are the "ragged-edge" of a much brighter and pervasive polar cloud layer called polar mesospheric clouds in the upper atmosphere, visible in a deep twilight. They are made of crystals of water ice. The name means roughly night shining in Latin. They are most commonly observed in the summer months at latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the equator. They can only be observed when the Sun is below the horizon.

They are the highest clouds in the Earth's atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85kilometres (47 to 53 mi). They are normally too faint to be seen, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in the Earth's shadow. Noctilucent clouds are not fully understood and are a recently-discovered meteorological phenomenon; there is no record of their observation before 1885. (thanks to Wikipedia)

Walking through to a bedroom on the other side of my house I noticed the red super giant star, Antares (Rival of Mars) glowing orange in the southern sky and peeping above the roof tops. Scorpius can only be seen in the middle of summer at our northern latitude of 52 degrees.

Star map showing
the constellation
Scorpius (Wikipedia)

Antares (Wikipedia)

Antares is a supergiant star with a stellar classification of M1.5Iab-b.^[3] It has a radius of approximately 883 times that of the Sun;^[6] if it were placed in the center of our solar system, its outer surface would lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Based upon parallaxmeasurements, Antares is approximately 550 light-years (170 parsecs) from the Earth.^[1] Its visual luminosity is about 10,000 times that of the Sun, but because the star radiates a considerable part of its energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, the bolometric luminosity equals roughly 65,000 times that of the Sun. The mass of the star is calculated to be 15 to 18 solar masses.^{[10] (Wikipedia)}

Answers to 'Martian Crust': Image A is the 'Crust on a Sour Dough Loaf' and Image B is the 'Martian Polar Cap'