March is the Time for Galaxy Quest Every year, March signals the time for astronomers and astro-photographers to bring out their big scopes and start viewing the seemingly endless array of galaxies that appear in the night sky. The constellation Virgo is best known for its abundance of galaxies, but the Big Dipper (Ursa Major) […]
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Everybody Loves a Cluster with a Nebula This is NGC 2264, the Cone Nebula, and the Christmas Tree Cluster. The bright stars that appear to lie upon this nebula are part of the Christmas Tree Cluster. The cluster contains more than 600 stars, but most of them are not visible to the naked eye. […]
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Look to Orion! Orion is a very interesting constellate for several reasons. It’s probably one of the easiest constellations to find in the winter skies, and the name of its second brightest star is used in the name of two popular movies – (“Betelgeuse” and “Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse!”) – and it contains a lot of interesting […]
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How Many Stars can You See? This is M45 the Pleiades. The Pleiades is a star cluster that been recorded by many cultures including the Mesopotamians, the ancient Greeks, Japanese, and Native Americans. It is described in both the Bible and the Talmud and 11th-century Arab literature. Many cultures measured visual acuity by asking someone […]
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Saying Goodbye to the Atlas Comet! I took the image above of Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) at 6:10 a.m. on September 30 as it was approaching the Sun. On October 12, I got this picture of it just above the Western Horizon as it was starting to accelerate away from the Sun: And finally on […]
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Comet of the Year! After a week of cloudy mornings, I finally got a break in the clouds and took this image of Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) at 6:10 a.m. on September 30. This is the comet that’s been on the news lately. It’s about 65 million miles away from us and getting closer. I […]
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The Rest of the Veil! Last month I posted this image of NGC 7974, the Western Veil Nebula. Almost immediately after posting this image, I got asked if there was an Eastern Veil. Of course, there is an Eastern Veil (NGC 6992), and here’s an image: And there’s also a central veil, which is called […]
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The Nebula of August August greets us with quite a few nebulae in the NE skies. Here are three prominent ones. This is NGC 7974, the Western Veil Nebula. This nebula has a visual magnitude of +5.0, but it’s extremely difficult to see unless you have a telescope with a good light filter. NGC 6960 […]
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With the passing of the Summer Solstice on June 20, the Earth starts to tilt away from the Sun and the night starts to lengthen. On the Summer Solstice, the Sun rose at 5:46 a.m. and set at 8:20 p.m. That means we received about 14 hours and 34 minutes of daylight. On July 1, […]
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A Good Month for Globular Clusters! NASA defines globular clusters as “stable, tightly gravitationally bound clusters of tens of thousands to millions of stars found in a wide variety of galaxies.” That literally means a sphere of stars! June will offer a chance to see two very beautiful examples of globular clusters with your naked […]
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