Written by 
A bright Quadrantid meteor flashes below the Big Dipper on Jan. 4, 2024. Bob King The Quadrantids make a bright splash at the darkest time of the year. They’re also a final opportunity to “gas up” before we enter the desert of winter and its dearth of major showers. Not until the Lyrids arrive in […]
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 20 ■ Sirius and Procyon in the balance. Sirius, the Dog Star, sparkles low in the east-southeast after dinnertime. Procyon, the Little Dog Star, shines to Sirius’s left by about two fists at arm’s length. But directly left? Well, that depends. If you live around latitude 30° (Tijuana, Austin, New Orleans, Jacksonville), the […]
Every year, Taurus returns to the autumn and winter skies of the Northern Hemisphere. In iconic illustrations, this constellation outlines the drama of a huge bull as he charges. Indeed with his easy-to-find V-shape horns, the Bull seems to be leaping right out of the sky, a pattern recognized in cultures across the world. With […]
Comet ATLAS exhibits a bright coma and short dust tail pointing southwest on December 15th. At the time it was magnitude 8.1 and 19° from the Sun. Nick James, BAA Comet ATLAS (C/2024 G3) is on its way! Discovered April 5th by the automated Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) when it was magnitude 19 […]
A Geminid fireball competes with the waning gibbous Moon on December 11, 2022. Moonlight will affect this year’s shower as well.Eliot Herman It’s a tough year for the Geminids. The annual meteor shower butts up against the nearly full Moon when it reaches maximum on the night of December 13-14. The official peak is forecast […]
Jupiter gleams in Taurus northeast of Aldebaran and the Hyades above the figure of Orion. The brilliant planet is unmistakable in the eastern sky at nightfall, shining at magnitude –2.8 with a disk 48.2″ across.Bob King I can’t resist Jupiter’s pull and I’m only half joking. Venus may surpass it in brightness, but at magnitude […]
The Fornax Dwarf is a dwarf spheroidal galaxy and satellite of the Milky Way discovered by Harlow Shapley in 1938. Located about 450,000 light-years away, it’s unusual in possessing a large number of globular clusters — six in all. Four are visible in 8-inch and 10-inch telescopes.ESO / Digitized Sky Survey Road trip! Dark-sky die-hards […]
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 […]
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 […]