NAKED EYE

On Saturday (Jan. 2), the earth will reach the point on its orbit known as perihelion, our closest approach to the sun. Now wait a minute, you might be thinking. Why is it so cold outside and there is snow on the ground if we are actually closer to the sun? The seasons are caused […]

Just after it gets dark, check out the two planets hanging in the southwest twilight glow. The bright one is Jupiter and its dimmer companion to the left is Saturn. If you look at the night sky a lot like I do, you might notice that over the past few months, they have been getting […]

Welcome to fall and the beautiful crisp clear nights it brings. If you are wondering about that bright red object in the east just after it gets dark, that is Mars. We are extra-close to it now so it appears quite luminous. Over the next month, it will dim as we pull away from the […]

Have you seen that bright red object low in the east just after it gets dark? If not, go outside and check it out. That is Mars! You might think its unusual color is due to the smoke in our skies, but it really is red. Every two years and 50 days we catch up […]

Welcome to summer and a beautiful night sky filled with stars, four bright planets, the Milky Way, and even shooting stars. If only we could stay up long enough for it to get dark! Here at the summer solstice, the sun does not set until 9 p.m. and it does not get really dark until […]

Our home in the vast cosmos, the Milky Way galaxy, contains an estimated 300 billion stars. Because of photographs taken by the Hubble orbiting telescope, we now know that there at the least hundreds of billions of other galaxies out there and maybe more, each one of which contains such large numbers of stars. In […]

If you go out and look at the stars every night like I do, you might have noticed something different up there in the sky. The stars slowly scroll across the heavens each night because of the rotation of the earth, and they also move with the changing of the seasons. Rarely does anything happen […]

We all miss the sunshine these days when our sun hardly seems to make it over the horizon, and hangs low in the south for the few hours a day it dares to show its face. Its warmth seems feeble and often it does not even dispel the heavy clouds which plague our winter days. […]

Have you seen Venus yet? If not, check it out low in the southwest just after sunset, and before it gets completely dark. It is the brightest object up there besides the moon, so if you do spot it, it will be unmistakable. Look above and to the left of where the sun went down. […]

For centuries, sailors, explorers and Boy Scouts have used the North Star as their compass in the night sky. Lined up right over the North Pole, Polaris, the name we have given to it, never moves, but holds a steady position always pointing due north. Even a compass is not as accurate, especially if you […]