The Astrospheric app forest fire smoke distribution map across North America for Sunday night, July 28, 2024. Purple and red indicate the most severe smoke loading in the sky overhead. Many weather forecasts will predict clear, cloudless skies – but observers and imagers will find the fainter celestial objects significantly dimmed. I highly recommend the…
Read more
This image of Saturn through the 20″ diameter telescope at the Weikersheim Observatory in southern Germany just after it emerged from behind the moon was the NASA APOD for April 7, 2013. It was composited together from two different exposures by Jens Hackmann. Hi, Summer Stargazers! Here are your Astronomy Skylights for the week of…
Read more
This image taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the fascinating Aristarchus Plateau. The crater Aristarchus at lower right is very prominent, and can be seen even with unaided eyes as a very bright patch. To its left is the similar-sized, but darker crater Herodotus. Vallis Schröteri, the largest sinuous rille on the moon, starts…
Read more
This image from the Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory shows the spectacular globular star cluster Messier 4. This great ball of ancient stars is one of the closest of such stellar systems to the Earth and appears in the constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion) close to…
Read more
This image of Messier 13, the Great Globular Star Cluster in Hercules was imaged by my friend Claudio Oriani in Richmond Hill, Ontario on May 30, 2023 using an 8″ SCT telescope. The cluster, also known as NGC 6205, is 24,000 light-years away from our sun. The cluster appears as a faint fuzzy patch in…
Read more
This view of the southern evening sky at 11 pm local time for the latitude of Toronto shows how the Milky Way rises from the southern horizon and arcs across the eastern sky at this time of the year. The coloured symbols and labels are a selection of the brighter deep sky objects sprinkled available…
Read more
When the moon is full, and within hours on either side of that phase, there are no shadows cast anywhere. All of the variations we see are due to changes in the moon’s geology. This image by Michael nicely shows the numerous rays systems emanating from the younger craters, the various types of dark basalt…
Read more
I captured this handheld smartphone image of the young crescent moon and the strong auroral display of May 10, 2024 behind my home in Collingwood, Ontario, Canada. Conditions are again favorable for another spectacle if the sun sends a mass ejection in our direction over the next few days, before the moon brightens too much.…
Read more
This Digital Sky survey image shows the Antenna Galaxies aka NGC 4038, 4039 in the constellation of Corvus, which shines brightly in the lower part of the southern sky on early June evenings. The bright segments are the cores of two galaxies in the process of merging by mutual gravitational attraction. Curved streams of stars…
Read more
This image of the Snowglobe Globular Star Cluster (aka NGC 5466) in Boötes simulates the view through a telescope at 132x. The area covered by the red circular viewport covers a bit more than the full moon’s size in the sky. On a dark night, the cluster can be seen as a faint fuzzy patch…
Read more