Astronomy observing tips and guides
For folks in the United States, July evenings mean 4th of July fireworks. While you’re waiting for the show, be sure to watch for the most elusive of the planets as twilight falls, as Mercury shines at its very best for 2025. If you’ve never seen the innermost world before, now is a good time to try. This is because Mercury reaches greatest elongation, or its greatest point from the Sun as seen from our Earthly vantage point later this week.
A team of astronomers and astrophysicists affiliated with several institutions in Australia has found that a mysterious fast radio burst (FRB) detected last year originated not from a distant source, but from one circling the planet—a long-dead satellite. The team has posted a paper outlining their findings on the arXiv preprint server.
LUNAA Journeys (St. LUcia National Astronomy Association) is looking to address an all too common problem in the global astronomical community. Too often, participation in astronomy is seen as cost prohibitive, the sole pursuit of large universities or organizations that can afford to build a large modern observatory, or launch the Hubble Space Telescope. This is unfortunate, as there’s never been an era of more readily accessible information, out there in terms of astronomy and skywatching.
How can radio astronomers successfully identify extraterrestrial radio signals while discerning them from Earth-based radio signals? This is what a recent study published in The Astronomical Journal hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how machine learning could be used to search for extraterrestrial technosignatures while simultaneously identifying radio contamination from human radio signals. This study has the potential to help radio astronomers develop more efficient methods in searching for and identifying radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.
NASA's Perseverance Rover didn't just look up—it captured a sprint across the Martian sky! On March 1st, its navigation camera locked onto Deimos as the moon raced overhead in the pre-dawn darkness. Sixteen rapid-fire, 3-second exposures stacked together reveal the moon's movement across the Martian sky. The pictures were taken in very low light, so it's pretty grainy and noisy, but there are two additional stars in the sky, Regulus and Algieba, in the constellation Leo.
A new space mission is open for business. Last week, we got a look at science images from NASA's SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Re-ionization, and Ices Explorer) mission. The mission will now begin science operations, taking 3,600 unique images a day in an effort to create a 3D map of the sky.
Telescopes can have more than one sensor. Those sensors can utilize some of the same infrastructure, like lenses and mirrors, and specialize in collecting different data. A good example of this is the Inouye Solar Telescope (IST). It is the largest solar telescope in the world, with a primary mirror diameter of 4 meters. It also has five separate instruments, four of which are currently in operation. The latest of these to come online is the Visible Tunable Filtergraph (VTF), which just collected its first light according to a press release by the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research, one of the project partners.
How can we turn the sun into a telescope?
Just how powerful is the world's most powerful telescope?
How can you fairly compare one telescope to another? It's all in the (angular) resolution.
Got clear skies this weekend? If clouds cooperate, observers in the North Atlantic and surrounding regions may witness a rare spectacle: a partial solar eclipse. This is the second eclipse of 2025, and bookends the first eclipse season of the year. The season started with March 14th total lunar eclipse. Depending where you are observing from, this is a shallow to a deep partial, 'almost' total solar eclipse.
Thursday brought with it a total lunar eclipse for parts of the world that could see the Moon. If you missed it (like I did) then no problem since Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost mission has got your back. The lunar lander took a break from its science duties on our nearest astronomical neighbour to capture this stunning image of the eclipse. Observers on Earth saw the shadow of the Earth fall across the Moon but for Blue Ghost, it experienced a solar eclipse where the Sun hid behind the Earth!
After a long 'eclipse drought,' lunar totality once again spans the Americas The end is in sight. If skies are clear, North and South America will witness a fine total lunar eclipse early Friday morning, March 14th. This is the first eclipse of 2025, and the first total lunar eclipse for the hemisphere since November 2022.
At the end of 2023, there were more than 5,000 satellites orbiting Earth, with 10s of 1000s more on the way. Although individual satellites might be invisible to the unaided eye, their collective light might already be causing a 10% brightness increase in the night sky. Large surveys like Vera Rubin will see frequent satellite trails obscuring important data. And the radio pollution is also increasing with communications satellites. What can be done to restore the sky?
Universe Today