Author: Editor

Here’s a brief look at what’s going on in the skies above the Mile High City this week.

January 20:

Dear readers,

What follows is the most difficult article I have ever written. On Friday, September 23, 2022, my wife Wendee died. She had been suffering from metastatic breast cancer for over a decade, but this past summer she was truly and clearly suffering.… Continue reading.

SLS Launch Further Delayed – Following previous technical delays, the first Space Launch System (SLS) rocket returned to the safety of NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building before the landfall of Hurricane Ian. After confirming that it suffered no damage, NASA announced they’re likely to make another launch attempt in November.… Continue reading.

Dear Don,

You left us far too soon, my friend. From your home in California and later in Arizona, you lived quietly and well, with a passion for stargazing that dominated your life.

As the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “I am like a slip of comet,/ Scarce worth discovery.”… Continue reading.

New JWST Images – James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) astronomers have continued to release new images. Among them is a mosaic covering an area about eight times the size of Webb’s First Deep Field released in July. The mosaic was made for the CEERS program, which is surveying a fraction of one square degree of sky with JWST in various infrared wavelengths.… Continue reading.

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly stars and clusters seen;

Round celestial islands have I been

With telescope after telescope to the night sky hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That Galileo ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Baade speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new star cluster swims into his ken;

Through his majestic window looks upon the Milky Way

He star’d at the centre of our galaxy.… Continue reading.

Webb Observations Released – NASA released the first full-color images and spectra taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, that weren’t alignment or test images. The telescope operates in infrared, so for humans to be able to see Webb images, the wavelengths detected are shifted to visible light wavelengths such that they appear to be color images.… Continue reading.

Ever since I read Bart J. Bok’s foreword to Rose Wilder’s and Gerald Ames’ The Golden Book of Astronomy, I have marveled at what the night sky had to offer and how much of that has changed. “Such wonders,” Bok wrote,” fill this book.”… Continue reading.

JWST Survives Micrometeoroid – NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) team revealed that a micrometeoroid hit one segment of its primary mirror, causing a very slight degradation in its image. The impacting object was roughly the size of a dust particle, but still a bit larger than pre-launch estimates predicted should hit the mirror during the lifetime of the telescope.… Continue reading.

On May 30 observers all across the western hemisphere were outside, hoping to see a wonderful “new” meteor shower. The shower is actually not new. It is called the Tau Herculids, and it sends us dust particles from Comet Schwassmann-Wachman III.… Continue reading.