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…
During the process of purchasing and building land for astronomical purposes, one has to consider that the purchased property has to meet the basic land regulations to allow for the building of the desired structures….
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…
The Spring Triangle is a popularly known pattern or group of stars that can be seen in the night sky in the northern celestial hemisphere to help astronomers find other objects in the sky. The defining vertices of this imaginary triangle can be found…
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…
The Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram is a scatter plot of stars showing the relationship between the stars’ absolute magnitudes, otherwise known as their luminosity, versus their stellar classifications, otherwise known as their effective temperatures. A simple definition of what the diagram represents is…
Planned to be the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope’s primary scientific mission has four key goals: to search for light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the Universe after the Big Bang, to study the formation…
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…