In 1892, George Ellery Hale, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Chicago, convinced the university president to acquire two 40-inch telescope lens blanks. With funding from Charles Yerkes, a Chicago mass-transit tycoon looking to refurbish his image, Hale spearheaded the creation of an observatory to house the Great Refractor made with these blanks.Continue reading "Oct. 21, 1897: Yerkes Observatory is dedicated"

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Looking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column.  October 20: Lovely spiral NGC 7331 The Orionid meteor shower peaks this morning — the perfect time to watch for shooting stars, as Earth turns into the meteoroid stream of dusty debris responsible for the show.  The best time to do someContinue reading "The Sky Today on Wednesday, October 21: Catch early-morning Orionids"

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Just as we use latitude and longitude to know the precise position of something on Earth’s surface, it’s useful to have a system for knowing the position of objects in the heavens. The widely used system of right ascension and declination does the job — and dates back at least to the time of HipparchusContinue reading "Understanding celestial coordinates"

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Few sights thrill backyard observers as much as the Orion Nebula (M42). The brightest stellar nursery visible from mid-northern latitudes resolves into a complex web of luminous gas and dusty tendrils even through modest telescopes. And at its core, you’ll see the brilliant young stars of the Trapezium Cluster that provide the energy to setContinue reading "JWST tours Orion’s hidden stellar nursery"

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BepiColombo, a joint mission of the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, launched Oct. 20, 2018. The spacecraft is actually two satellites in one, the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO), commissioned with investigating one of the least-visited planets in our solar system. To reach its final position,Continue reading "Oct. 20, 2018: BepiColombo launches"

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Looking for a sky event this week? Check out our full Sky This Week column.  October 19: Feast your eyes on the Southern Fish Located in northern Pegasus, NGC 7331 is a bright galaxy that is the largest in a group of five galaxies collectively known as the Deer Lick Group. It’s best viewed in early evening,Continue reading "The Sky Today on Tuesday, October 20: Lovely spiral NGC 7331"

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Rocket launches this week On Monday, Oct. 19, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) successfully launched its Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission aboard an H3-24L rocket from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan at 3:41 p.m. EDT. MMX will study the martian moons Phobos and Deimos and is designed to return a sample from PhobosContinue reading "Japan sends MMX toward the martian moons"

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Sometime around the year 1837, a strange object passed an invisible cosmic mile marker: 1,000 astronomical units from the Sun. (One astronomical unit, or AU, is the average Earth-Sun distance.) For more than a century, it continued undetected toward our star. Finally, on Oct. 19, 2017, humans noticed the visitor. That night, a faint, thinContinue reading "Oct. 19, 2017: The discovery of ‘Oumuamua"

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Dave Doctor from Las Cruces, New Mexico The Hamburger Galaxy (NGC 3628) is an edge-on spiral in Leo, some 30 million light-years away, and a member of the Leo Triplet along with M65 and M66. Tidal interactions with those neighbors has extracted a faint tidal tail about 300,000 light-years long, part of which trails offContinue reading "A hamburger with a tail"

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