Galaxies

Some planets are easy to find in the night sky, while only one is usually difficult. That’s because Venus, Jupiter, and Mars at their closest are all brighter than any star, plus Mars has an obvious orange color. Mercury always has a distinctive position low in morning or evening twilight. But Saturn doesn’t readily stand out. Tune in to hear how you can find Saturn.

Saturn arrives at its closest point to Earth of the entire year. So let’s locate it. It’s the ONLY bright star in that entire section of the heavens. We’ll also discuss Saturn’s composition and its journey around the sun.

Once in a while, the sky offers a profusion of great beauty that happens to lie slightly below the limit of what the eye can see. That’s when you need a good pair of binoculars. Tune in to hear what phases of the moon you can expect to see.

One of the all-time lowest Full Moons you’ll ever see graces us this month, but the real fun happens a few nights from then as the “star” closest to the Moon, Saturn, is at its biggest and brightest of the entire year. Hear how to spot Saturn and why it’s hard to locate.

Bastille Day is here and we had our own Independence Day fireworks just recently as well. So speaking of explosions, unimaginable violence is up in the sky too – and keeps happening. The greatest are supernovas. Tune in to hear how these cause a star’s total destruction.

A supernova is the biggest explosion that ever lights up the modern universe, and happens around once a century in each of the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the cosmos. Tune in to hear about the sun and if it can go "supernova."

Tune in to hear about when a predawn conjunction will take place, and hear about all the wild features of our closest planet, Venus.

This week our eyes face the most concentrated part of our Galaxy. If it's clear, and you’re away from city lights, September's crisp air allows the Milky Way to emerge in all its glory. That’s because our own galaxy’s disk is now perpendicular to the horizon so that it crosses the entire sky and passes straight overhead.

We’re all on the lookout for nature’s patterns. The most obvious are solar rhythms — like the recent solstice. Civilizations all paid attention to solar patterns because their food production depended on it. Next in line were the Moon’s rhythms, mostly that its phases repeat every 29.5 days. This week we cover the rhythms of the universe!

It's widely misunderstood where in the heavens the sun sits at the time of the solstice. Traditionally it was the zodiacal sign of Cancer, hence "Tropic of Cancer" as the earthly place where you’d see the midday sun standing straight overhead. But despite the lingering name, the solstitial sun drifted out of Cancer and into Gemini two thousand years ago. This week: a special solstice.