The Messier Objects are a set of 110 astronomical objects catalogued by the French astronomer Charles Messier in his Catalogue des Nébuleuses et des Amas d’Étoiles. Interestingly, Charles Messier was actually fascinated with finding comets, which meant that to avoid confusing…
Simplified to NGC as an acronym, which represents New General Catalogue is a catalogue of deep-sky objects compiled by John Louis Emil Dreyer in 1888 that contains 7,840 objects. These objects are known to include many deep space objects, including galaxies, star clusters, emission nebulae and absorption…
Classifying comets can be done in several different methods, including orbital period, orbital body, and orbital shape. The reason for such variation is that how comets orbit, where they orbit, and the orbiting body makes…
A nebula is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases. The term nebula originally described any diffuse astronomical object, and did include galaxies beyond the Milky Way. This did at one point in time include the Andromeda Galaxy, which…
The age old discussion of “Is Pluto a planet” is one that is quite fascinating. We are not going to be deciding if Pluto is or is not a planet, but we will be discussing…
Star clusters are very large groups of stars. There are two types of star clusters can be distinguished by astronomers. The first type of star cluster is the globular cluster, which are tight groups of hundreds to millions…
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, stargazing can be defined as “the act or practice of a stargazer.”[1] Digging a bit deeper, Merriam-Webster defines a stargazer as “one who gazes at the stars, such as an astrologer or…
Leap years are a calendar year that contains an additional day added to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical year or seasonal year. As a result of the Earth’s revolution around the Sun taking approximately 365.242189 days, there needs…
A specific miniaturized type of atomic clock, the Deep Space Atomic Clock is a ultra-precise mercury-ion atomic clock that would be utilized for precise radio navigation in deep space. Managed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and activated in…
Atomic clocks are clock devices that utilize a hyperfine transition frequency that is based upon certain frequencies of atoms as a timekeeping element. Atomic clocks are the most accurate time and frequency standards known, and are used as primary standards for international time distribution services. Utilizing atomic…