Basic astronomy and night sky information
All five bright planets are visible in the sky during this last week of 2015 and into the new year. Here’s a roundup of where to find them and what to look for, along with your best chance to easily spot Comet C/2013 US10 (Catalina) on the first morning of 2016 [Read more…] about Planet Roundup… and Comet Catalina Update
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Many urban stargazers enjoy chance meetings with curious passersby who take an interest in looking through a telescope. But none of us will likely receive the caliber of visitor who twice knocked on the observatory door of a lone astronomer in Washington, D.C. on a warm August night in 1863 [Read more…] about President Lincoln Goes To The Observatory
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The tiny northern constellation Triangulum contains the gorgeous face-on spiral galaxy Messier 33, also known as the Triangulum Galaxy. A photogenic target for expert astrophotographers, the Triangulum Galaxy is a next-door neighbor of our Milky Way Galaxy and the most distant object you can see with your unaided eye. As you can see in the above image by Terry Hancock and Ron Brecher, the spiral arms of M33 are festooned with pink star-forming nebulae. The largest, NGC 604, is some 100x the size of the Orion nebula and hosts more than 200 massive stars at its center.
The spiral arms of M33 are loosely bound, and the galaxy is a type-Sc spiral using Hubble’s galaxy classification system. The galaxy spans a diameter of 50,000 light years, about half the diameter of the Milky Way. Indeed, M33 belongs to the so-called Local Group of Galaxies which includes the Andromeda Galaxy, the Magellanic Clouds, and our own Milky Way. M33 may itself be a large satellite of the much larger Andromeda galaxy, Messier 31.
(Note: The Triangulum Galaxy is one of the dozens of deep-sky sights featured in The Armchair Astronomer, a collection of astoundingly beautiful images of clouds of gas and dust where new stars are born. If you haven’t yet downloaded this e-book, you can find it here…)
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“O star of wonder, star of night,
Star with royal beauty bright,
Westward leading, still proceeding,
Guide us to thy perfect light.”
It may be the most famous star in history. But was it real? Mentioned just once in the gospel of Matthew, the “Star of Bethlehem”, or the “Christmas Star”, may have guided three wise men from the East in search of a newborn king. A few words written on a scroll two thousand years ago isn’t much to go on, but astronomers have a few ideas that may explain the apparition of a star near the time of the birth of Jesus.
[Read more…] about The Science of the Christmas Star
Here’s a little Christmas present from the imaging team in charge of the OSIRIS camera on the Rosetta spacecraft, the little European probe that has been orbiting comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Though they were criticized for keeping the images to themselves for many months, the team has finally released a treasure chest of images online for the first time since Rosetta encountered the comet in August 2014. More images of the comet will be released into the albums in time. You can explore the images and albums of the Rosetta encounter with Comet 67/P at the link above [Read more…] about Fly Along With a Comet
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