You may fondly remember the classic Eighties science program Cosmos, narrated by the late great astrophysicist Carl Sagan. In the episode “The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean”, he famously uttered “we’re made of star stuff”. We are the products of nucleosynthesis, a set of processes that created the chemical elements, the building blocks of all we see and are.

2024 is almost here, and in astronomy, a lot will be happening.

Dark matter. You’ve probably heard of it, maybe in a Sci-Fi novel or movie, and you’ve probably wondered what it is exactly. Well, welcome to the club. Scientists have been asking themselves this question since its discovery in 1933. Dark matter is an invisible, mysterious substance that makes up 22% of the universe, but we know very little about it.

Ring nebulae and the rings of Saturn are among some familiar rings that exist in space. But consider ring galaxies!

In a total eclipse, the moon covers the sun completely and the sky darkens as if it were dawn or dusk.

On the night of October 5, 1923, using the 100-inch Hooker telescope on Mt. Wilson, Edwin Hubble captured a photographic plate image of M31, the Andromeda “Nebula”.

This year’s festival will run from September 14 through 16th, to coincide with the September new moon.

If you’ve been paying attention to the news in the past year you’ve no doubt heard about the James Webb Space Telescope. However, there is another space telescope that still deserves your attention.

One of the best meteor showers of the year will peak during the second weekend of August, presenting the perfect opportunity to spot shooting stars streaking across the sky.

Recently, scientists announced detection of a persistent gravitational wave background (GWB), continually rippling the cosmos like a calm ocean breeze.

When people hear the name “Edwin Hubble,” they typically think of the Hubble Space Telescope. However, the Hubble Space Telescope was built after Edwin Hubble’s death as a way to honor him.

The concept of scotobiology as a science was developed at a conference on light pollution held in Muskoka, Ontario, in 2003. Just as the word “photo” relates to light, “scoto” is the word that relates to “darkness.” Therefore, Scotobiology is the study of the role darkness plays in living organisms.

Have you ever wished upon a shooting star? For most of us, the novelty of wishing on a shooting star has faded since the days of our childhood.

The telescope’s most important discovery to date has been finding the farthest black hole located at the center of a rare type of galaxy.

On September 26, 2022, a NASA spacecraft ran into the asteroid Dimorphos at nearly 15,000 miles per hour. Far from being a multi-million-dollar boondoggle, this collision is precisely what astronomers had planned. The spacecraft was part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, or DART for short. The goal: to test technology that could potentially divert a large asteroid, should we ever locate one on a collision course with Earth.

From June 7-11, we will hold our first ever StarFest to celebrate Lake City’s starry skies and gather other dark sky advocates and interested folks from the western slope, the San Luis Valley, and throughout Colorado to see what more can be done to assure our precious night skies can be enjoyed by future generations. Unfortunately, light pollution is getting worse around the world so taking action is critical to turning things around.

Gleaming naked-eye apparition, Venus has captivated civilization since antiquity, garnering epithets of divine power and beauty-- Chac-Ek (“Great Star”) in Mayan, Jin-xing (“Golden Planet”) in Chinese, Phosphoros (“Lightbringer”) in Greek.

Back when our beloved western cities were still young and their skies still dark, customers waited weeks or even months for basic household items to reach their local mercantile shelves.

Imagine being a poor 13-year old boy living in France in 1744 and observing a 6-tailed comet in the daytime. What aspirations might that have generated in a teenager?

The name Milky Way means two things: the star-packed photogenic river of stars across sky for one. It also refers to the hundreds of billions of stars that make up our galaxy. No matter where you look in the Western Slope sky, every star is part of our galaxy.

Comets, once considered portents of doom, have long puzzled us. They move rapidly against the starry background. They grow tails, which may explain why the ancient Greeks called them “hairy stars.” Their brightness and even their exact paths can be hard to predict. So, what are these mysterious visitors that sometimes appear in our sky?

In the very early hours of November 8, the second total lunar eclipse of 2022 will be visible from Western Colorado.

This month is a great time to view Jupiter, because this 86,000 mile-wide, giant planet is visible nearly all night long.

Olbers’ Paradox - A familiar constellation in the dark night sky.