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

The weather hasn’t been kind to us in December. We have been using this downtime to do maintenance and we have been busy. Here are some of the things we have done in the last few weeks. We have:

·       new iPads for our inside scopes. We updated the software and our old tablets weren’t up to the task.

·       new power banks to run two of our outside scopes.

·       a storage solution for our eyepieces.

·       repaired our weather station. Did you know that you can see the current conditions and a live image of the sky on our webpage?

·       been working on our Imaging Observatory. We should have new images coming from there soon.

2025 was a great year at the Community Observatory. Here are some of the relevant statistics:

·       We saw 11,711 of you at our 168 events.

·       About 7,300 of you attended our Friday and Saturday public viewings.

·       We hosted 31 school groups with  1,061 students.

·       Our Solar program held 30 events and about 3,000 of you attended those.

This was made possible through our 64 volunteer docents who worked a total of 3,036 hours.

2025 featured several amazing sights. We had the “Planetary Parade” in January and February. Even though the media over-hyped this it was still amazing to see all or most of the planets in the sky at once.  We had a very active Sun that gave us some amazing views and a great aurora on November 11th. We celebrated the “Observe the Moon” night and got to watch Saturn’s largest moon Titan transit the planet. There were two beautiful comets this fall and we had a good Perseid Meteor Shower viewing in August and an epic Geminid Shower on December 11th.

We are anticipating that 2026 will be a good year as well. There will be a full lunar eclipse on the night of March 2nd. Both the Perseid and Geminid meteor showers will feature moonless skies this year. There will certainly be other serendipitous celestial events during the year including comets, supernovas, or auroras. We will announce those here as we become aware of them. We are hoping for good weather for our 2026 opening next Friday and Saturday (January 9-10).  

Stay tuned!

Did you visit us last year? Please comment about your experience.

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