Many Things In Space Stay The Same For A Human Lifetime, But Not The Bat Shadow. Hubble Pictures Taken

Please, forecast, be right about tomorrow night.

(For where we live, that's clear).

Video of the Day!

NASA's Parker Solar Probe broke a record! It got within 3.8 million miles of the Sun's surface - closer than any human-made object before! Not only that, it's the fastest human-made object, reaching a speed of about 435,000 mph.

Dragons fighting in space?

Just kidding. These "dragons" are made up of gas and dust in the emission nebula NGC 6188, which is 4000 lightyears away in the Ara constellation!

Image by: Carlos Taylor

Video of the Day!

NASA’s next mission to the Moon will carry LEXI (the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager), an instrument which will provide the first-ever global view of the magnetic field that shields Earth from solar radiation!

I see an angry fox about to breathe fire.

Hind's Variable Nebula, NGC 1555 // Rocco Sung

Space News!

A star located 12,000 lightyears from Earth engulfed one of its planets! It was previously believed that planets were engulfed by their stars expanding, but that isn't the case here. The planet, over millions of years, orbited closer to its star, to the point it was eventually engulfed by the star. The image is an artist's rendition of what happened.

Wed. 9/25: We'll be closed tonight due to clouds. We'll try again next Wednesday!

The Black Eye Galaxy. Image Credit: Shane Johnson | Jamie Kern | BSU Observatory.

Imaged in luminance and photometric R, V and B filters. Total exposure time ~25 minutes.

The Black Eye Galaxy (M64) is a relatively nearby spiral with an extraordinary amount of dark dust partially obscuring its nucleus. Red hues peeking out in these dust lanes are caused by reddening when the dust scatters the bluer light from stars embedded within it. The color difference between the center and spiral arms is due to an average age difference between the stars in these locations--blue stars have short lives, so as the star population ages the overall color appears more red.

We're Open Tonight!

The observatory will be open tonight, Sept. 27, 7:30 - 9:00 pm! We expect mostly clear skies, and to see Saturn, the Moon, the Ring Nebula, globular cluster M13, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Double Cluster, and the binary star systems Albireo and Mizar.

Here's a a nice picture of the Double Cluster in the constellation Perseus (we didn't take this picture, but it's similar to what you'd see through our telescopes - you won't see a lot of those dim background stars, though). [Image Credit and Copyright: Greg Polanski | Source: Astronomy Picture of the Day].