4/2/25: We'll Be Closed Tonight Due To Clouds And Rain. We'll Try Again Next Week.

Our supply of eclipse glasses is running very low.

Picture of the Day!

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured a stunning image of the iconic Pillars of Creation, a region where new stars are being born within thick clouds of gas and dust. The three-dimensional pillars resemble towering rock formations, yet they are much more porous. Composed of cool interstellar gas and dust, they sometimes appear semi-transparent in near-infrared light.

We're not yet sure about tonight's weather - it depends on whether these clouds move north or south. Check back in a few hours!

I'm sure the visitors will arrive soon

Our Halloween event is Wednesday, Oct. 25 from 7:00-8:30pm, weather allowing! Check in the early afternoon that day to see if the weather will allow it to go on.

If not, we have a rain date planned for Thursday (and a 2nd rain date for Monday if neither work out).

2023 October 23

Moon Io from Spacecraft Juno Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, SwRI, MSSS; Processing & Copyright: Ted Stryk & Fernando García Navarro

Explanation: There goes another one! Volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io keep erupting. To investigate, NASA’s robotic Juno spacecraft has begun a series of visits to this very strange moon. Io is about the size of Earth’s moon, but because of gravitational flexing by Jupiter and other moons, Io’s interior gets heated and its surface has become covered with volcanoes. The featured image is from last week’s flyby, passing within 12,000 kilometers above the dangerously active world. The surface of Io is covered with sulfur and frozen sulfur dioxide, making it appear yellow, orange and brown. As hoped, Juno flew by just as a volcano was erupting – with its faint plume visible near the top of the featured image. Studying Io’s volcanoes and plumes helps humanity better understand how Jupiter’s complex system of moons, rings, and auroras interact. Juno is scheduled to make two flybys of Io during the coming months that are almost 10 times closer: one in December and another in February 2024.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231023.html

We'll be closed tonight, Wednesday Oct. 11. We expect up to 70% cloud coverage depending on which forecast you believe, and the satellite images look terrible.

HOWEVER keep an eye out this Saturday for the solar eclipse! If the weather is clear, we'll start giving out information and eclipse glasses around classes at 10:30 am and set up some solar telescopes on the observing decks. The eclipse lasts from12:18 to 2:34 pm. In the case of clouds, we'll only stream the eclipse in the lobby on the first floor.

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

Cosmic fireworks ahead! This dramatically colorful image shows MACS J0717, one of the most complex and distorted galaxy clusters known. It was formed by the collision of four smaller galaxy clusters. A visible-light image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows hundreds of galaxies, both within the cluster and throughout the background, and myriad foreground stars. A pink overlay represents radio data from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, which traces enormous shock waves and turbulence. The diffuse emission in blue, from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, highlights gas with temperatures of millions of degrees. Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, NRAO/AUI/NSF, STScI, and R. van Weeren (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics); NASA, ESA, J. Lotz (STScI), and the Hubble Frontier Fields team. ALT TEXT: Hundreds of small galaxies of various shapes on the black background of space. They are concentrated near the center of the image. Dramatic pink ribbons form a curving L shape near the center. Below them, a linear pink feature with a blue blob in the middle extends from upper left to lower right. Diffuse blue light fills much of the field of view and is brightest just to the right of the pink ribbons.

The NGC 70 Group // Michael Legary