If you’re about to stay up all night atop a cold mountain, to squint through an eyepiece at shimmering, impossibly distant specks of light or to stare at pixels on a screen, it helps to have eaten a good meal first. So it was dismaying to learn recently that Palomar Observatory in Southern California, home…

This month holds great promise for stargazers, as several astronomical wonders are coming. With the annual Perseids meteor shower just around the corner, as well as a handful of planetary conjunctions, there’s a lot to see up in the night sky in August. When and Where Can I See the Perseids? The Perseids, one of…

Join the Boise State Physics Department for our First Friday Astronomy Event:Friday, August 2, 7:30 p.m. in the Liberal Arts Building, Room 106. Jason Williams, project scientist at NASA’s Cold Atom Lab, will present: “NASA’s Cold Atom Lab: Six Years of Quantum Science on the International Space Station”. The event is free and open to the public.…

Eye on the sky: the glass mirror, one of the largest convex mirrors ever made, was produced by Corning Advanced Optics (Rubin Observatory/NSF/AURA/F. Munoz Arancibia) The secondary mirror belonging to the Simonyi Survey Telescope has been installed at the Vera C Rubin Observatory, which is based in Cerro Pachón in the Andes. At 3.5 m…

This artist’s concept shows a pulsar, which is like a lighthouse, as its light appears in regular pulses as it rotates. Pulsars are dense remnants of exploded stars, and are part of a class of objects called neutron stars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Evidence for potential dark matter objects has been detected using pulsars, which are neutron…

Katherine Carver ’26, physics and mathematics, started off her UMBC experience with a big bang—participating in the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory CIRCUIT internship as a first-year student in spring 2023. Carver says she took advantage of every opportunity she could, from on-site guest lectures and panel discussions to informally networking with APL employees…

A chemical mystery lurks in the laboratory of Tycho Brahe, one of the most famous astronomers of all time. Tycho Brahe (1546-1603) was a pioneering Danish astronomy instruments enthusiast in the decades before the telescope was used for peering at the sky. Aside from that and a big supernova discovery, Brahe also experimented with alchemy,…

The CHAPEA crew stands in front of their simulated Mars mission after its end on July 6, 2024. From left: Kelly Haston, Nathan Jones, Anca Selariu, and Ross Brockwell. Credit: NASA/Josh Valcarcel Last June, a group of four people embarked on a more-than yearlong mission to a place that looked a lot like Mars. They…

In August, you have the chance to witness four of the 12 best astronomy events of 2024! Even better, these events are accessible to all levels of observers and don’t require any special equipment. Read on for a detailed forecast of celestial wonders for August 2024. Use the Sky Tonight app to find the night…

What it is: Globular cluster NGC 2005 Where it is: 162,000 light-years away, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, and visible in the constellation Dorado When it was shared: July 7, 2024 Why it’s so special: This new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows an object with mysterious…