The FAS Astronomers Blog

  • Planetary Opposition and Conjunction

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 30, Number 13. You might have seen some articles recently (September 2022) about Jupiter’s bright opposition. You also might remember Mars’ opposition of 2018, which was the closest since 2003. But, what you ask, is an opposition? Let’s find out. The eight (or maybe nine?) planets of our solar system orbit…

  • Geometry, Omega, and the Universe

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 30, Number 12. Way back when we were in high school, many of us studied geometry. We learned about triangles, rectangles, and parallel lines. We found that the sum of the angles in a triangle equals 180o. What we didn’t know then is that this geometry was first described by Euclid…

  • Return to the Moon with Artemis

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 30, Number 11. Humans last set foot on the Moon in December 1972 when Apollo 17 landed in the Taurus-Littrow region. After three lengthy EVAs on the surface, Eugene Cernan returned to the Lunar Module on the morning of December 14. They lifted off from the Moon later that evening. This…

  • The James Webb Space Telescope

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 30, Number 10. Those of us in the Forsyth Astronomical Society spend a good deal of time (too much time?) staring at the night sky through our telescopes. There are many things to look at and I’ve summarized them in several previous articles. However, our view of the heavens pales compared…

  • The Higgs

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 30, Number 9. It has been ten years since July 4, 2012. Yes, ten years since that massive discovery. With this discovery a weight was lifted off all of physics. (Puns intended). It was the discovery of the Higgs. The underlying structure of the universe is described by the standard model…

  • The Deep Sky

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 30, Number 8. When most of us start out in astronomy, we usually focus first on learning the Night Sky. This is followed by the purchase of a telescope and a few backyard sessions spent looking at the Moon and planets. Then we might follow by observing a few stars. However,…

  • Sagittarius A* and the Event Horizon Telescope

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 30, Number 7. Some 26,000 light years away, between the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius, is the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Our galactic center is extremely dense with stars packed in much tighter than here in the galactic outskirts. The editors of EarthSky note that it would outshine a full…

  • The History of the Universe

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 30, Number 6. This is a story of the Universe. The Universe is big, really big. It also has an interesting history, although one where lots of things happened in the first three minutes or so before everything settled down to a 13.8-billion-year timeline stretching up to the present. I guess…

  • Stars

    FAS Astronomers Blog, Volume 30, Number 5. Stars are huge balls of hydrogen plasma powered by nuclear fusion reactions at their core. Stellar Distances Except for the Sun, which is 93 million miles away, stars are a vast distance from us. Therefore, it isn’t always practical to measure these distances in miles, so astronomers use…