Florence
University of North Alabama Telescope Viewing
256-765-4284
Shows offered Tuesday and Friday nights. Viewings still available with planetarium presentations.
Stargazing often intimidates beginners because the sky itself is so complex. Consider the following:
Truly, the catalog of objects visible to the unaided eye is impressive — and overwhelming.
January 14
The Stardust spacecraft got a gravitational “kick” when it flew past Earth. After gathering particles from Comet Wild 2, the craft was retargeted to fly past Comet Tempel 1 in 2011, and the Earth encounter will give it enough extra energy to rendezvous with the comet. Another spacecraft slammed an instrumented probe into Tempel 1 in 2005, so the follow-up observations will look into the crater gouged by the impact.
February 18
Galileo is best known for its reconnaissance of Jupiter. As it transited the asteroid belt en route to Jupiter, though, it made the first close flybys of asteroids, passing within a few hundred miles of Gaspra and Ida. It discovered that Ida has a tiny moon, which later was named Dactyl. In 1994, Galileo provided the only direct look at the impacts of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter.
Voyager images (clockwise from top left) of Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and NeptuneVoyager 1 and 2 conducted a "grand tour" of the outer planets during the 1970s and '80s.
Lunar farside, 1959In 1962, the American Mariner 2 staged the first successful encounter with another planet when it flew past Venus. Its instruments recorded Venus' surface temperature and pressure, and the composition of its atmosphere and the clouds that envelope the planet.
The Sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a vast cloud of gas and dust. Material in the center of the cloud was squeezed so tightly that it became hot enough to ignite nuclear fusion.
Mercury's surface closely resembles the Moon's. It is covered by impact craters, ancient lava flows, and quake fault lines. Mile-high cliffs stretch for hundreds of miles across the planet's surface. The huge Caloris impact basin, 800 miles (1,300 km) wide, decorates one side of the planet.
The technology of the 18th century highlights the southern evening sky now. A couple of faint constellations are named for the high-tech devices of the time. Pyxis, the compass, is quite low in the south-southwest at nightfall. Antlia, the air pump, is to its left.
