Ever thought of dipping your toes into astrophotography? Want to chat with other astrophotographers? The next meeting of the Battle Point Observatory’s Astrophotography Special Interest Group will be on Saturday, June 13th, at 11 AM in the Gardiner Library inside of the Battle Point Observatory.
Our weekly planetarium shows continue this month on June 6, 13, & 20 at 12:30 and 2:30! There won’t be any shows on June 27 – that’s when we kick off the Introduction to Astronomy 101 class.
Credit: Chuck Wraith
The Whirlpool Galaxy is a perennial favorite for star gazers in the month of May. It is an interacting grand design spiral galaxy and was first discovered by Charles Messier in 1773.
Source for events and links below are In-The-Sky.org, Dominic Ford, Editor. The links provide details for each event including a scale on how difficult they are to observe.
Light pollution now steals a pristine night sky from the majority of humanity. The rise of LED lighting, primarily since 2014, is to blame.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have discovered a stellar bar in GN20, a massive galaxy seen just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. The new paper was submitted to the preprint server arXiv on May 14.
A new race to the moon is emerging between the United States and China. Unlike fifty years ago, the goal is no longer just about landing and leaving, but establishing a base that allows for a sustainable presence and extended stays on the surface of our natural satellite. The objective is now to use the moon as a testing ground for technologies that will enable us to travel further, particularly to Mars.
Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? We don’t know, but scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: Large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form black holes, which can gobble up surrounding material and merge over time to form more massive entities.
Now, researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected clear evidence that some supermassive black holes were enormous from the beginning, forming without a stellar collapse phase, and without a significantly more massive host galaxy to feed them.
The focus of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is an active spiral galaxy on a journey lasting hundreds of millions of years. The galaxy Messier 88 (M88), also known as NGC 4501, is located about 63 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair).
Arcturus is a red giant star. It’s about 25 times the size of our sun, and some 170 times more luminous. And considering the fact that it’s only 36.7 light-years away, it should be little surprise that Arcturus is the 4th-brightest star in Earth’s sky.