What can you expect to see at the Community Observatory this weekend? 

October 10-11, 2025

 Grab your jackets! Fall is here and the weather is variable. It looks like both Friday and Saturday should have clear enough skies for us to open. DO get in the habit of checking communityobservatory.com or our Face Book page after 3 PM on the day you plan to visit. If we are going to close, we will announce it by then. The full moon was Monday and the waning gibbous moon won’t rise until close to 9 PM on Friday and later on Saturday. With the Sun setting around 6:30, we should have some nice dark skies as we open at 7:30 and throughout the evening.

 The Earth’s evening skies are facing an interesting part of the sky. The Big Dipper is receding into the northwest and the “W” shaped asterism of Cassiopea has moved overhead. The Great Square of Pegasus is below Cassiopea and, with a bit of imagination can be seen as a flying horse. The Pegasus Globular Cluster is one of the best. It is a group of around 100,000 stars and is one of the most densely packed globulars in the Milky Way galaxy. It is today’s image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Notice the colors of the stars. They range from the young, hot blue stars and the cooler, old reddish stars.

 The Andromeda Constellation is the tail of Pegasus, the flying horse. The Andromeda Galaxy lies just above the tail between it and the western end of the Cassiopea “W.” It occupies a huge area of the sky equal to the width of six full moons. It is one of the only objects that can be seen with your unaided vision in our night sky that is outside our Milky Way Galaxy. People with sharp vision can see it from a very dark sky. Its one-trillion stars lie two-and-a-half million light years away. It is very significant in the history of astronomy as Edwin Hubble was able to measure the distance to a specific star in it as about one-million light years away. That meant that it was OUTSIDE of our galaxy and that our galaxy was not the only one. Up until then it was assumed that the glowing patches that were seen were a part of the Milky Way.

 Capella is one of my favorite stars. It is the third brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere behind Arcturus and Vega. It is actually four stars consisting of two red dwarfs and two stars about two-and-one-half times the size of our Sun. It is 43 light years away. The Pleiades Star Cluster just below Capella is also rising during our evening sessions and should be high enough to view before we close at 9:30.

 There are two comets that are currently visible now but they are likely too low in the sky for us to see them during our public sessions this weekend. They will probably be visible later this month and into November.

 Saturn and Neptune are the only planets that are visible in the evening now. Saturn is opposite the Sun right now and is at its closest and brightest. Personally, viewing Saturn and the Andromeda through a $20 telescope wwhen I was 23 years old was what spurred me on to a life of loving astronomy.

 Please, as always, check our calendar on communityobservatory.com for last-minute closures before you come.  Come prepared to pay $2 to the college for parking.