A relatively rare event—an extra day in February, the every-four-years February 29th—greets us again this Monday. Why does this happen? As you might expect from my posing the question on this blog, the answer is wrapped up in astronomy. In…

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… Two black holes collided and merged, releasing unimaginable quantities of energy in the form of gravitational waves. Last year these waves were detected on Earth by an exquisitely sensitive pair…

It seems as though Lynchburg’s record of clouding over for interesting celestial events is going to hold true for this weekend’s total lunar eclipse. But just in case all the forecasters are wrong, and for those of you who live…

Just a quick post to show you this great eclipse photo from my friend Mike Overacker, shot with a Canon 6D and a 600 mm lens at f/5.6.  The small dot to the left and slightly above the Moon is the…

Take a look at this beautiful time lapse video of the night sky. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqOBPDWl5Gc Ah, if only we could find nice dark skies, we could see such sights ourselves, right?  Well, no.  Actually, you would need to travel to Australia…

For those of you found the star charts in the previous post to be useful, you may want something you can print out without draining all the black ink or toner you have. These are the same star maps, but…

To boldly go where no one has gone before… Bigger than Elvis? I would say so. NASA announced today that the Voyager 1 spacecraft launched 36 years ago has finally entered interstellar space, the space between the stars. This is…

Last July, I posted about the possibility that the Curiosity spacecraft might be captured during its parachute descent to the Martian surface by another spacecraft in Mars orbit, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Indeed it was, and the resulting image is…

In the post just previous to this one, you saw some views of Earth and Saturn generated by a very useful online tool, Solar System Simulator. I thought I would use that tool to show you the Cassini spacecraft’s changing…

Those of you who read this blog as an email will likely be unable to see the embedded videos that are a part of it. For that you need to go to the blog site itself: http://redchairblostg.wpenginepowered.com/starstruck/.