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Rich in cyclic phenomena, astronomy has always been fertile ground for metaphors. Lunar occultations are a good example. When the Moon temporarily hides and then reveals a star, death and resurrection might come to mind. Or something less profound like a game of peekaboo. Both fit. It’s one of my favorite facets of the hobby […]
The constellation Grus, which means Crane in Latin (of the bird variety), is often overlooked and I’m not really sure why. Maybe it’s simply due to other surrounding constellations being loaded with deep-sky targets, such as Sculptor with its gaggle of galaxies. Grus’s relative obscurity is unfortunate, as it contains a variety of pleasing sights […]
Mohammad B. Mireskandari / S&T Online Photo Gallery Sometimes the obstacles in our path steer us not away from our goals but on a more meaningful path toward them. It turns out cloudy skies, blocked horizons, and some neighborhood light pollution were precisely what I needed. After months of spending my nights dashing outside to […]
Sometimes, the best things come in threes. The system V404 Cygni is an old favorite with astronomers. The binary contains a 9-solar-mass black hole that’s slurping gas from a star slightly less massive than the Sun. Astronomically speaking, only a hair’s breath separates the pair: 0.14 astronomical unit, or less than half Mercury’s average distance […]
Artist’s impression of a quasar showing the accretion disk where matter is heated as it spirals down the black hole, the tiny dark dot at center. Also shown are beams of particles and radiation focused by the disk’s powerful magnetic field. PG 1634+706, named for the Palomar-Green (PG) Bright Quasar Survey, is the most distant […]
An artist’s conception of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) 19 spacecraft, which launched into orbit this past summer.Lockheed Martin / NOAA There’s a new Sun-observing instrument in orbit, set to fill a potential future gap. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shared the first images this week from the Compact Coronagraph (CCOR 1) […]
The coma glows green from diatomic carbon (C2) emission, while the blue ion and white dust tails nearly overlap on October 19th. Image details: ASA Astrograph 12-inch, f/3.6 and ZWO ASI 6200MM Pro camera Gerald Rhemann Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS has been wonderful. I’ve rarely seen so much interest in a comet, with first-time skywatchers getting such […]
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS (C/2023 A3) was a beautiful naked-eye and binocular sight at dusk on October 13th from near McGregor, Minnesota, about 90 minutes after sundown. The tail extended 7° in binoculars and 5° with the naked eye — even in bright moonlight! A faint segment of the antitail glows pink below and right of the […]
This spectacular close-up of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS was made on Sept. 30th from Namibia with an ASA 12″ f/3.6 Astrograph. The comet exhibits a prominent dust tail, a blue gas tail, and what appears to be the beginnings of an anti-tail (at top).Gerald Rhemann, Michael Jäger & Denis Möller I’m mostly a nighttime observer, but Comet […]