The returning darkness to our evening sky of late summer is dominated by one very bright star. Vega, high overhead in the tiny constellation Lyra, is more than twice the mass of our sun, but punches out a whopping 40 times the luminosity of our home star. And at only 25 light years (ly) away—just …
Noctilucent clouds near Kakwa, Alberta Unless you’re dedicated enough to get up in the middle of the night with very good binoculars or a small scope to view the Virgo cluster of galaxies cresting our southern horizon, your stargazing options have greatly diminished. However, this gives me the chance to relate a uniquely northern meteorological …
Noctilucent Clouds – a rare meteorological phenomena for northern observers Read More »
What the constellation Cancer lacks in bright stars, it makes up for with its special deep sky resident, the Beehive open star cluster, or M44 in the Messier catalogue. At less than 600 light years (ly), the Beehive is one of our nearest open clusters. So with its 1,000+ stellar members, swarming in a 22.8 …
A Contrast in character—meet our neighbour, and maybe even a distant relative Read More »
Andromeda is the big daddy of galaxies amongst our Local Group of about 50 galaxies. At over 200,000 ly in diameter, Andromeda is more than twice the diameter of our Milky Way.
These photos chronicle the Windy Arm fire that took place this past summer. Looking across Windy Arm, post-fire (first week of September) from the Skagway roadside. Strikers Valley leads away, directly across the lake. Dark burnt areas are clear along the flanks of Book Mountain (to the right). Most of the steep draws on Book …
In our northern sky is a prominent bright star that, with amazing precision, dramatically dims by a factor of more than three for about an hour, before returning to its normal brightness. A flirtatious cosmic wink from the distant realms of deep space perhaps?
Messier 13 (M13), the best and brightest globular cluster gracing our northern sky, resides in the Hercules constellation and is a most-intriguing class of star cluster, so very different from all the open star clusters of our Milky Way galaxy.
One of my favourite star clusters resides high overhead in our winter sky. In fact, it is always in our sky, for our viewing pleasure, as it is circumpolar. It is close enough to the North Star (Polaris) that it never sets. I am actually referring to a pair of clusters, the famous Double Cluster …
The Double Cluster – Stellar beauties from a distant spiral arm Read More »
When a budding interest in astronomy is pursued with even a cursory investigation into the nature of our cosmos, one quickly comes to the realization that the human mind cannot fully embrace the awesome extent of it all—the unfathomable distances and mind-bending time scales—the incomprehensible vastness of the gulf of space. And although even our …
A Vast and awesome Universe – Understanding cosmic distance through analogy Read More »
