Special to CosmicTribune.com, August 10, 2023 Excerpts from weekly Sky&Telescope report. SUNDAY, AUGUST 6 ■ The Big Dipper hangs diagonally in the northwest after dark. From its midpoint, look to the right to find Polaris (not very bright) glimmering due north as always. MONDAY, AUGUST 7 ■ A few Perseids trickle in starting in late July, then they […]
Special to CosmicTribune.com, July 17, 2023 Excerpts from weekly Sky&Telescope report. SUNDAY, JULY 16 ■ The tail of Scorpius is low due south after dark, to the lower right of the Sagittarius Teapot. Look for the two stars especially close together in Scorpius’s tail. These are Lambda and fainter Upsilon Scorpii, known as the Cat’s Eyes. […]
Special to CosmicTribune.com, May 13, 2023 May is the month when the Milky Way is altogether missing from the evening sky, for those of us living in the latitudes of the continental United States. That’s because the Milky Way now lies all the way around the horizon in a circle, and the North Galactic Pole […]
Analysis by CosmicTribune.com, July 21, 2022 What are we to make of the new images ostensibly from the James Webb Space Telescope? “These aren’t photographs. They are data visualizations!” noted Tim Fernholz in a report for Quartz. So are we to take these spectacular presentations on faith and the word of the Biden White House […]
Special to CosmicTribune.com, March 23, 2022 2MASS J17554042+6551277 is the coordinate-based catalog designation of the star centered in this sharp field of view of the world’s largest space telescope which was launched on Dec. 25, 2021. The diffraction pattern is created by the 18 hexagonal mirror segments of the James Webb Space Telescope. After unfolding, […]
Special to CosmicTribune.com By Bill Federer, Aug. 25, 2018 The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), made a major contribution to the scientific revolution by discovering that the planets revolved, not around the Earth, but around the Sun. Copernicus, who had a doctorate in cannon (church) law, wrote: “The Universe, wrought for us by a supremely […]
July 24, 2017 [CLICK HERE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION: Mike O’Day] Behold the largest ball of stars in our galaxy. Omega Centauri is packed with about 10 million stars, many older than our Sun and packed within a volume of only about 150 light-years in diameter. The star cluster is the largest and brightest of 200 […]
[Click Here for High Resolution, Lóránd Fényes] Is our Galaxy this thin? We believe so. The magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is viewed edge-on from planet Earth. Also known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop on many telescopic tours of the northern sky, in the faint but […]
May 21, 2017 Utah amateur Patrick Wiggins discovered a possible bright supernova in the spiral galaxy NGC 6946 in Cygnus on May 13. If confirmed, 2017 eaw will become the 10th supernova found in this explosion-rich galaxy in the past century, reaffirming its reputation for fireworks of the grandest kind. It was Wiggins’s third supernova, […]
What is pictured is a sharp telescopic view of a magnificent edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 3628, a puffy galactic disk divided by dark dust lanes. Of course, this deep galactic portrait puts some astronomers in mind of its popular moniker, The Hamburger Galaxy. The tantalizing island universe is about 100,000 light-years across and 35 million […]
