Can You See the Stars??

Tell Everybody About It

It’s that time of year again–time for the GLOBE at Night 2008 observation event. It’s something everybody can do, no matter whether you live in a city or out in the country. It’s an easy, 5-step procedure to help determine just how much light pollution is affecting our views of the night sky:

  1. Find your latitude and longitude (the site helps you do this)
  2. Find Orion (the constellation) in the sky by going outside an hour after sunset (your time);
  3. Match your nighttime sky to one of the GLOBE at Night magnitude charts;
  4. Report your observation;
  5. Compare what you see with what others around the world can see.

It’s as easy as that. You can do this as part of a classroom activity, or with your family or friends. But the important thing is to do it. You’ll learn about the sky, about how human activity affects our view of the stars, and where the darkest places are on Earth. Whether you’re a parent, a teacher, or a student, the GLOBE at night site has something to offer; and you have something to offer back: your ability to observe and make reports.

Check it out! Help explore patterns of light pollution on a global scale.

I’m Being Followed by a Moon Shadow

An Eclipse Being Eclipsed by a Mountain

from Astronomy Picture of the Day, March 1, 2008

by Alex Mukensnable

If you aren’t reading Astronomy Picture of the Day every day, you should be. It’s one of my daily stops and it never fails to reward me with a great view of something cool in the cosmos. The image above is the March 1, 2008 entry, and it features a beautiful image of the eclipsed Moon rising through the shadow of Mauna Kea in Hawai’i on February 20, 2008. It’s stunning and reminds me of the view I saw each morning when I was doing an observing run on Mauna Kea back in 1996. We’d see the shadow of Mauna Kea off to the west, created by the rising Sun in the east. Seeing a shadowed eclipse like this is truly amazing.

Alex Mukensnable has published a stunning time-lapse of the eclipse as seen from Hawai’i (which missed totality due to the fact that the islands were too far west of the zone of totality). This image is a still from that film, which you can see here. Enjoy!!

Exploring Science and the Cosmos

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