Recent Astronomy Articles at Cosmic Pursuits

Guide to Observing Saturn in 2019

July 4, 2019 By Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Solar System

This composite image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on 6 June 2018, shows the ringed planet Saturn with six of its 62 known moons.

Many casual observers get hooked on amateur astronomy after a first look at Saturn through a telescope. More than a few have looked through my small refractor on a night of good seeing and asked of Saturn, “Is it real?”

Oh, it’s real, all right. And incredibly beautiful… the color, the proportions, the apparent 3D perspective of this grand icy world. It is arguably the finest sight accessible with a small telescope. The planet reaches opposition on July 9, 2019 and will remain bright and large in a telescope over the next few months. Here’s how to find it and see it in a small telescope.

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The Great ‘South American Eclipse’ of 2019

July 2, 2019 By Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Celestial Events

Observers in a narrow band across the southern Pacific Ocean and north-central Chile and Argentina enjoyed a rare spectacle today: a total solar eclipse. The lovely seaside towns of La Serena and Coquimbo, Chile, enjoyed two minutes and thirteen seconds of totality, and observers at some of the world’s great astronomical observatories got in on the fun. This is the first total solar eclipse visible anywhere since the ‘Great American Eclipse‘ of August 21, 2017. The next total solar eclipse occurs on December 14, 2020, once again across the South Pacific, Chile, and Argentina.

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Hopping Galaxies in the Bear’s Den

June 20, 2019 By Joe Bergeron Filed Under: Deep Sky

The galaxies M82 (lower left) and M81 in the constellation Ursa Major. Image credit: Joe Bergeron.

So many galaxies, so little time! A good place to begin an evening of galaxy hopping on a northern spring or summer night is with the Messier galaxies M81 and M82 in the constellation Ursa Major (see above). Conveniently located by drawing a line through the Big Dipper stars Phecda and Dubhe and extending it an equal distance beyond the Big Dipper asterism, this is probably the finest galaxy pair in the sky. Separated by just 38 arc-minutes, both fit into the low power field of a small telescope. With a 22mm Panoptic eyepiece in my 8″ EdgeHD telescope, I had 93x and a field of view of 45 arc minutes, so I had to slew the mount a little from one to the other to see them both well [Read more…] about Hopping Galaxies in the Bear’s Den

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The Taurus Molecular Cloud

June 4, 2019 By Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Astronomy Images and Video

Many stargazers are familiar with the giant Orion Molecular Cloud, a vast star-making complex some 1,300 light years away that harbours, among many other celestial objects, the Great Orion Nebula. But there’s a closer, lesser known molecular cloud quietly churning out new stars just 430 light years away towards the constellation Taurus. The Taurus Molecular Cloud, or TMC-1, is smaller and less dense than Orion but it still intrigues professional astronomers. The complex contains hundreds of solar masses of dust and gas and all sorts of complex organic molecules formed out of the soot of long-dead stars [Read more…] about The Taurus Molecular Cloud

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The Poet Laureate of Stargazing

May 31, 2019 By Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Stargazing

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great and good American poet, essayist, and humanist Walt Whitman. Sometimes called the ‘father of free verse’, Whitman was often beheld as the key to understanding America as it was in the promising days of late 19th century, after the Civil War. He was also, in my view, the poet laureate of stargazers everywhere, especially on account of two of his poems ‘When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer’ and ‘A Clear Midnight’, reproduced below for your reading pleasure.

“A Clear Midnight”
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes
thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Or enjoy the latter poem in the video format below (which is likely the only time you will ever see a video from ‘Breaking Bad’ on this website):

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