Friday is the beginning of the month of Ramadan for Muslims around the world. Contrary to what many non-Muslims believe, Ramadan is not an Islamic holiday or a religious observance. It's actually the name of the ninth month on the Islamic calendar.  As amateur astronomers and other skygazers know, Friday is also the day of July's first crescent moon. This is not a coincidence. More on that in a moment.  The reason Ramadan is important to Muslims is that it's the month in which the Prophet Muhammad is said to have begun receiving revelations from Allah (the Arabic name for God, also used by …

Today is the first day of summer, also known as the summer solstice. It's the longest day of the year (and the shortest night). The actual moment of the solstice will occur at about 7:09 p.m. this evening, while the sun sits directly above the Pacific Ocean to the west of Hawaii. As you may remember from your grade school science lessons, the seasons and the changing lengths of the day and night throughout the year are a result of the Earth's axial tilt. Try to visualize the Earth's orbit around the sun as an elliptical path on an imaginary plane in space. As the Earth rests in that plane, …

Vesta was the Roman goddess of hearth and home, but there's nothing warm or cozy about her celestial namesake. That Vesta is a barren, airless "protoplanet" that circles the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter amid the primordial space debris of our solar system's main asteroid belt, where it is regularly pelted by its much tinier neighbors―and, as scientists have learned, occasionally clobbered by not-so-tiny ones. Vesta is in the news this week because of the initial published findings from NASA's Dawn space probe, which arrived at Vesta last July as part of its mission to collect …

This month's unseasonably cool and overcast weather has put a damper on all kinds of outdoor activities, including skygazing. What you may not know, particularly if you're new to the hobby, is that there are a number of free software packages that let you explore the heavens from the comfort of your desk. It's the next best thing to being in your backyard with a telescope. We'll take a quick look at three of the most popular options, each of which is available for both Windows and Mac. Google Sky Google Sky is not a separate software package, but is rather a mode available in the free Google …

Flyers fans probably know the name "Messier" as that of the long-time captain of the hated New York Rangers. For backyard astronomers, though, the name means someone else altogether. And with apologies to Mark Messier and his six Stanley Cup rings, I think the astronomers' Messier will be longer remembered. Hey, that's not a comet Charles Messier (1730-1817) was an astronomer. Like many astronomers, though, he wanted to be a famous astronomer, and one of the most surefire ways to do that in the 18th century was to get a comet named for you as its discoverer.  It had already worked for Sir …

I'm often asked how expensive an astronomy hobby is, or how much my own observing equipment cost me.  More than once I've been told, "I'd like to get into astronomy, but I can't afford it." Thanks to decades of science fiction films and highly publicized space exploration, any pastime dealing with the heavens is often assumed to require high technology and a heavy wallet. Perhaps this would be a good time to note that Galileo made his most important discoveries with a home-built telescope that contained weaker optical lenses than a $50 pair of binoculars.  Ancient peoples made astonishingly …

Because you're taking the time to read this column, I will assume you know that the Milky Way is not only a candy bar. But have you ever actually seen it? For an increasing number of people, the answer is "no." More on that in a moment. First, some background. The Milky Way is the galaxy―the gravitational grouping of more than 100 billion stars―to which our Sun belongs. It's what's known as a barred spiral galaxy. Most of the stars in it are located in the central, bar-shaped region from which two long, spiral shaped arms protrude. Our Sun is not in the center, but out in one of the arms.  In…

...that's amore. Is it just me, or is that song always playing on the PA system at Olive Garden? Big moon tonight March's full moon is tonight.  That's reason enough to glance skyward―I never get tired of looking at the moon―but tonight's full moon is exceptional.  For the first time in 18 years, the full moon is taking place within one hour of the moon's perigee, or its closest approach to Earth. What this means for us Earthbound folk is that the moon will appear fully 14 percent bigger tonight than it does when at its apogee, its orbit's most distant point from Earth. (Any natural or man-…