Tag archives: galaxy
The public is invited to join Westmont’s astrophysics students to learn more about the moon on NASA’s International Observe the Moon Night on Saturday, Sept. 14, from 7:30-9:30 pm at the Westmont Observatory. “The moon is something we’re so used to seeing, and it’s an important part of our life here on Earth,” says Jen […]
Westmont’s monthly stargazing event features a triangle asterism, a globular cluster and a waxing moon on Friday, August 16, beginning about 8 pm and lasting several hours at the Westmont Observatory. Along with the college’s powerful Keck Telescope, members of the Santa Barbara Astronomical Unit bring their telescopes to share with the public. The 12-day […]
Star Trek is my religion. I grew up imagining a future of contact with alien beings who we could learn from. Back in 1950 physicist Enrico Fermi asked, “But where is everybody?” If our galaxy is teeming with planets and our planet is nothing special, why haven’t we encountered any evidence of aliens? We have […]
Get your popcorn and astronaut ice cream ready for some rare astral entertainment. The famous Comet C/2022 E3 ZTF – at its peak February 1 and 2 – can be viewed at NNE, 23 to 40 degrees above the horizon, from 9 pm to sunrise, with amateur telescopes and possibly your 10x binoculars. The significance […]
Local astronomy instructor and former NASA scientist Tom Farr will be teaching kids and families all about space. We will be learning about the sun and its eight planets (plus Pluto!), including our own planet Earth. We’ll also cover the leftovers of the solar system such as asteroids, meteors, and comets before traveling beyond our […]
Tune in you star trekkers, gazers, and galaxy aficionados, Las Cumbres Observatory’s (LCO) Astronomy on Tap is back on the planet every month in a new location: the outside patio at M Special Taproom on State Street. The new venue allows for the Astro on Tap monthlies to be an all-ages event, while still be […]
It’s globular cluster season at the Westmont observatory with this month’s viewing focusing on two conglomerations containing hundreds of thousands of stars. The free, public viewing of the stars is Friday, July 15, beginning at 7 pm and lasting several hours. Face coverings will be required at the event. Westmont hosts viewings on the third […]
Location: Earth. Star-date 75825.4 (May 12, 2022): the long suspected supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy is confirmed by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team via millimeter-wave radio telescopes. Prior evidence and other phenomenon of Sgr A* was noted by astronomer Harlow Shapley in 1918, […]
The Westmont Observatory opens to the public Friday, March 18, beginning at 7 pm and lasting several hours. Face coverings will be required at the event. Due to the pandemic, this is the first time in two years the observatory has been open to the public. Westmont hosts a free, public viewing on the third […]
“Blasting off” is an expression which, only in recent years, has come to have a very special meaning. We are no longer talking about fireworks or even firearms, but about sending live human beings into what were once called “The Heavens” (as if there were more than one Heaven) but have now been relegated to […]
Late the other night my friend Joan called from the Cachuma Lake campground and asked excitedly what the string of lights was that had just tracked across their sky. Was it a UFO? Luckily, I had heard about Elon Musk’s latest launch of about 60 small satellites as part of Starlink, a satellite-based internet. I […]
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”— TS Eliot After surveying our solar system, as well as thousands of others beyond our own, we can now look back at our home planet with a new perspective, that […]
Twenty years ago, there would have been nothing to write about under this topic. There were no known planets circling stars beyond our own. But in 2009 a revolution happened with NASA’s launch of the Kepler telescope. Within a few years, Kepler had found so many planets that scientists realized that there were more planets […]
We all learned in school that there are eight planets (well, nine if you’re as old as I am), but our solar system is messier than that. There are millions of leftover rocks called asteroids; bits of ice and rock that come and go called comets; and objects out there beyond Neptune called, in dry […]
Uranus and Neptune, the twin ice giants of the solar system, are so far out there that they’ve only been visited once by Voyager 2 in 1986 and 1989. They’re so far away that light from the Sun takes two-and-a half hours to reach Uranus and over four hours to touch Neptune. For those reasons, […]
30 June 2004, 7:30 pm. The VIP room at JPL is quiet as we all watch a thin line trace horizontally across the big screen at the front of the room. It’s the radio signal from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft as it speeds toward Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) after seven years in transit. JPL invites some […]
March 9, 1979 and Voyager 1 had just left the Jupiter system en route to its rendezvous with Saturn. Linda Morabito, the cognizant engineer for the navigation team, noticed something odd about one of the images of Jupiter’s moon Io: There was a ghost image protruding from the side of the moon. She was using […]
On July 20, 1976, seven years to the day after humans first walked on the moon, a bunch of us new employees of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory trooped over to Caltech’s Beckman auditorium (the one that looks like a circus tent) to see the first landing of a spacecraft on another planet. Viking 1 was […]
I was already in the Science Team room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the second cycle of radar images of the surface of Venus were beamed down in May of 1991. I waited impatiently for the five-inch print roll to start spooling out. The first cycle had gone well and most of Venus’s surface […]
As a kid I was always picking up rocks and wondering at the diversity of them all. Where did they come from? And family camping trips gave me a sampling of the varied landscapes of California and the West. When I found out I could combine my love of the outdoors with the study of […]
