Category: Fundamentals

A lot of people who fall in love with astronomy find themselves wanting to learn the constellations. So they start Googling. They download apps. The most ambitious among them pull up a list of all 88 constellations and think, I’ll just learn them all. Others take a softer approach, soaking in whatever they can catch…

Everyone loses their mind over a supermoon. The headlines write themselves, social media fills up with enormous orange disks, and for a few nights the Moon gets more attention than it usually does all year. Fair enough. I love me a good supermoon, too. But there’s a quieter counterpart that almost nobody talks about, and…

The Moon is a hungry beast — or so it seems when it gobbles up entire planets and stars without warning. One moment Mars is glowing brilliantly next to the lunar limb, and the next it’s simply gone. No fade, no warning. Just gone. That’s a lunar occultation. And if you haven’t witnessed one yet,…

Most beginners spend a lot of time learning what to look for in the night sky. Far fewer take the time to understand how big things actually are up there (or at least how big they appear). Arc seconds, arc minutes, and degrees are how astronomers measure angular size and angular distance in the sky.…

Some celestial events happen once a decade. Some you have to travel for. Some require you to be in exactly the right place, on exactly the right night, with clear skies you’ve been praying for all week. Miss them and you wait years for another shot. This is the roller coaster ride of astronomy! These…