Latest News and Posts

  • Observing the Moon and Planets

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 14. Saturday, October 16, 2021, is International Observe the Moon Night, so this is a great time to go outside, look up, and do some observing. Many amateur astronomers begin their tour of the night sky by viewing the constellations. For more on this, see the Night Sky. Once…

  • Unidentified Flying Objects (The Beginning)

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 13. Unidentified Flying Objects … UFOs … Hmmm … I might be stretching things a bit with this article. Or am I a bit out on “the fringe” of things? … Hmmm … First, do unidentified flying objects exist? Probably yes. Any flying object that is unidentified is technically…

  • Mercury

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 12. Mercury is the closest of our Solar System’s eight official planets to the Sun. It speeds around the Sun in just 88 days. Its orbit is the most elliptical of the eight planets (eccentricity .205), with a perihelion of 28.6 million miles (.3 AU) and an aphelian of…

  • Viruses and Vaccines

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 11. A pandemic has engulfed the world! Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a virus that can produce a respiratory disease called COVID-19. Viruses A virus is a microscopic germ made up of genetic material (DNA or RNA. It is covered by a capsid (shell) of protein.…

  • July 2021 FAS Meeting

    Wednesday July 14th, 7:30 pm, in the planetarium of Kaleideum North the Forsyth Astronomical Society will have its regularly scheduled monthly meeting. The program will be presented by our own Bruce Gavett. The program is titled The Road to the Moon: Apollo, the Final Steps. Bruce will review the Apollo program and the final steps taking…

  • Neptune

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 10. If we were to travel out in the Solar System, we would eventually reach the last of the official planets. I know, many would argue there is still one more planet out there, but that’s another story. Neptune is the only planet to be discovered through mathematical analysis.…

  • The Night Sky

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 9. The stars follow a very regular pattern when viewed from the Earth. They appear to move from east to west. This pattern repeats itself over the course of a night (Earth’s rotation) and over the four seasons of the year (Earth’s orbit). The constellations that dominate the night…

  • DNA, RNA, Genes, Chromosomes, and the Code of Life

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 8. Recently, a large rover named Perseverance landed on the planet Mars. Perseverance is searching for signs that Mars had life, or at least the conditions for life, sometime in the distant past. Fundamental to life is something called DNA. We have also been dealing with a pandemic caused…

  • First Humans in Space

    Young Astronomers Blog, Volume 29, Number 7. Sixty years ago, humans from the planet Earth left their world for the first time and journeyed above the atmosphere. On the morning of October 5, 1957, the world awoke to something new. For the first time in human history an artificial satellite was orbiting the Earth. The…