Since the dawn of human history, we have looked up into the night sky and found patterns in the stars. Some of us saw animals, others saw gods and heroes, but we all agreed that they were greater than our simple existence. In this blog series, we will take a deeper look into the constellations that Astronomers use to map today’s night sky. We will look into the history of each of the 88 constellations and the stars and objects that form them, to discover more about our culture, and our connection with the universe. Our first constellation on the list is bright, large,...
Lucky me. I’m taking a vacation next week. The same week that New Horizons will make it’s flyby of Pluto. It just means I get to watch from the road, from the outside in for once. I’m still looking forward to it, but with a cup of coffee and a national park as my venue, rather than a newsroom media call. At any rate, my posting will continue as I still feel like my blog-a-day rationale is beneficial for me as a writer (and hopefully for you as the reader), though I might mix in a few of my own photos from a...
When Charles Messier catalogued 100 different objects in the night sky, he couldn’t have imagined the richness and detail of each one of his individual discoveries, or that we would ever see them in such incredible detail as to understand what they truly are and how they evolve. But every time I see a new image of a well-known object, I not only see the new and amazing details revealed, I see the next level of technology that enables us to see it in a new light. This image of Messier number 64 gives me that view. Messier 64 is...
Globular Clusters are tightly packed collections of hundreds of thousands of very old stars, spherically distributed around the Milky Way Galaxy. They undergo little change, have nearly no gas, and have a stellar density way higher than the rest of the Galaxy. The first one discovered, in 1665, is messier 22, one of the most well studied, easily visible, and interesting globular clusters. Based on observations, this globular cluster contains at least two black holes. It is also one of only three globular clusters ever found to host a planetary nebula, a gaseous shell emitted by a dying star with...
