Clear Night

The weather has been very good this past week, and inspired by seeing an announcement that the campus astronomy club was having a stargazing session tonight, I got out my 7” Dobsonian telescope and had a gander at the sky this evening. Mars is small now as it retreats from its biannual closest approach to the Earth, but was still showing some detail. The Orion Nebula was beautiful as always — one of those objects that is remarkable to see no matter what size of optics you are using.

Coming up at the end of the month (from February 25 to March 8) there is an educational citizen science project called GLOBE at Night that is about light pollution. Basically sometime during this period you estimate the darkness of the sky using a set of star magnitude charts and report that along your exact location. These magnitude values will then get mapped — last year they got data from 60 countries.