This Saturday, April 27, has been declared (unofficially) International Astronomy Day. The reason for this day is to try to get people that normally are not thinking about astronomy to use a telescope and see Saturn since it is in opposition to the sun. Photo of Saturn taken in 2007 by Hunter Clifton Outten What does the opposition of Saturn This blog's main purpose is to share with you an interesting documentary from PBS that you can find by clicking here. I have talked about this subject before and what a shame! Imagine your children's children going outside at night and not being able to see the wonder of the constellations. Imagine the generation after this not even knowing what Just wanted to give everyone a quick heads-up that there may be a northern light show tonight across the United States/Canada border region tonight. As many of you know, the Sun has been rather active over the past week, and we are noticing a southward shift of the Bz which often indicates that a light show is possible. What is First of all, this blog and the image below are courtesy of a favorite astronomy site of mine, EarthSky.org. This site is downright terrific and was the inspiration for this blog, and it has graciously allowed me to use many skymaps in previous posts as well as this one. This site is an absolutely fantastic source for all sorts of Wow, it seems like a lot of people have similar ideas to I do about Mars... that there may be life on it or life was once there and it may be worthwhile to try to find it. NASA called upon scientists and engineers to help plan a new strategy to explore Mars. It resulted in almost double the amount First of all, this blog and the image below are courtesy of a favorite astronomy site of mine, EarthSky.org. This site is downright terrific and was the inspiration for this blog, and it has graciously allowed me to use many skymaps in previous posts as well as this one. This site is an absolutely fantastic source for all sorts of For a while now, researchers have struggled explaining how methane got into the atmosphere of Mars. Well, now there is an interesting theory to explain it. Researchers have discovered that when meteorites (in this case they used a 40-year-old meteorite from Australia called the Murchison meteorite) are exposed to similar ultraviolet radiation as to what they would be exposed to One of the easiest asterisma (which is an arrangement of stars) to see in the summer sky is a constellation called the Summer Triangle. This asterism of stars does not have a catchy name, but it is famous as a design we see on warm, summer nights. There are three stars that mark the corners of the triangle. The stars A branch of NASA called the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has a spacecraft called Cassini that has taken infrared images of one of Saturn's moons called Titan. There are several lakelike features, which are up to the size of the Great Salt Lake in Utah and are at least 3 feet deep. Others are more like swamps here on Earth.