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Welcome to the night sky report for March 2024 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. There's a comet making its way into the inner Solar System that's already observable with a telescope and might start to become visible to the unaided eye by late March or in April. Comet 12P Pons-Brooks has been observed on several of its previous appearances going back hundreds of years and one thing it's known for is its occasional outbursts. In March, the stars of spring lie eastward. Look for the constellations Gemini and Cancer to spot interesting celestial features like star clusters M35, the Beehive Cluster (M44), and NGC 3923, an oblong elliptical galaxy with an interesting ripple pattern. Find the Y-shaped constellation Taurus, the bull, high in the southwest. The Hyades star cluster forms the bull's face. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

A new study led by a team at Western University in Ontario, Canada finds that the subsurface ocean of Titan – the largest moon of Saturn – is most likely a non-habitable environment, meaning that any hope of finding life in this icy world is dead in the water. This is discouraging since Titan is the most organic-rich icy moon in the Solar System, so if its subsurface ocean turns out to be not habitable for life, it does not bode well for the habitability of other known icy worlds like Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede and Saturn’s moon Enceladus. This finding, if proven correct, means it is far less likely that space scientists will ever find life in the outer Solar System planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

On Sunday, October 9, 2022, a pulse of intense radiation swept through the Solar System so exceptional that astronomers quickly dubbed it the BOAT – the brightest of all time. After spending months combing through the data, astronomers now better understand its scientific impact. The source was a Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB), the most powerful class of explosions in the Universe. The burst triggered detectors on numerous spacecraft and immediately observatories around the globe followed up. The burst was so bright that it effectively blinded most gamma-ray instruments in space, which means they could not directly record the real intensity of the emission. US scientists were able to reconstruct this information from Fermi data. They then compared the results with those from the Russian team working on Konus data, as well as Chinese teams analyzing observations from their SATech-01 satellite and Insight-HXMT observatory. After combing through all of this data, astronomers can now characterize just how bright it was and better understand its scientific impact. Together, they showed that the burst was 70 times brighter than any yet seen.

Welcome to the night sky report for February 2024 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. Venus is beginning its exit from the morning skies this month, just as Mars returns to visibility. In February, the Winter Triangle is your guide to the night sky. The northern hemisphere is treated to views of the stars Procyon, Sirius, and Betelgeuse, as well as awe-inspiring views of the Great Orion Nebula (M42, NGC 1976), sculpted by the stellar winds of central bright stars as well as Bode’s Galaxy (M81, NGC 3031). The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

NASA’s history-making Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has ended its mission at the Red Planet after surpassing expectations and making dozens more flights than planned. While the helicopter remains upright and in communication with ground controllers, imagery of its Jan. 18 flight sent to Earth this week indicates that one or more of its rotor blades sustained damage during landing and it is no longer capable of flight. Originally designed as a technology demonstration to perform five experimental test flights in a 30 day period, this first aircraft to fly on another world has operated from the Martian surface for almost three years, performed 72 flights, and has flown more than 14 times farther than originally planned.

An international team of astronomers have discovered a massive dark object in orbit around a rapidly spinning millisecond pulsar. This unusual object was found as part of a binary system, a pulsar and an unknown compact object, in the globular cluster NGC 1851. Globular clusters are unique environments with hundreds of thousands of stars packed closely together, and likely places to produce strange cosmological pairs. While astronomers cannot conclusively say whether they have discovered the most massive neutron star known, the least massive black hole known, or even some new exotic star variant, what is certain is that they have uncovered a unique approach for probing the properties of matter under the most extreme conditions in the Universe.

With hundreds of major observatories worldwide surveying the sky and extremely high-tech camera-equipped space telescopes zipping around the Solar System, one could expect that there's nothing left in space for an amateur astronomer to discover. Yet in 2022 three creative amateur astronomers/astrophotographers made a remarkable find in one of the most observed and photographed areas of the night sky – the Andromeda Galaxy. Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner, and Yann Sainty discovered and photographed a never-before-seen oxygen [O III] emission arc next to our nearest spiral galaxy. The hours of hard work put in by these passionate amateurs earned them the top prize in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2023 competition, the world’s biggest space photography competition. It also earned them a place in the history books as the discoverers of a new filamentary emission nebula -- the Strottner-Drechsler-Sainty Object 1 (SDSO-1)… The amazing thing is that all of this was accomplished with an off-the-shelf 4-inch Takahashi refractor, an Oxygen-III (OIII) filter, and a lot of creativity and hard work.

Happy New Year and welcome to the night sky report for January 2024 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. The January sky is filled with bright stars in the constellations Orion, Taurus, Gemini, Canis Major, and Canis Minor. Find these cosmic gems by looking toward the southeast in the first few hours after it gets dark. The northern hemisphere also features beautiful views of Capella - a pair of giant yellow stars, Aldebaran - a red giant star, two star clusters - the Hyades (Caldwell 41) and the Pleiades (M45), and the Crab Nebula (M1, NGC 1952). The moderate Quadrantid meteor shower is active from Dec. 28 to Jan. 12, and peaks overnight on Jan. 4th. The Moon will wash out faint meteors, but the shower often produces bright fireball meteors. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.

NASA is having problems communicating with its spacecraft Voyager 1.

The world is changing rapidly. Everyday new problems emerge and it takes groundbreaking scientific discoveries to solve them. To stay ahead, the pace of science must accelerate and science needs to be even better, more accurate, and faster to enable the truly transformative breakthroughs that will help us thrive. NASA has just released its free Open Science 101 curriculum with the initial goal of training 20,000 scientists and researchers over the next five years, enabling them to embrace open science practices and maximize the impact of their work.

SPECIAL NOTE FOR GRADE SCHOOL TEACHERS: THIS IS A GREAT TEACHING OPPORTUNITY TO GET YOUR STUDENTS INVOLVED WITH THE NASA SPACE PROGRAM. Five weeks remain for you to add your name to a microchip that will ride aboard the Europa Clipper spacecraft as it explores Jupiter’s moon Europa. It’s not every day that members of the public have the chance to send their names into deep space -- all the way to Jupiter and its moon Europa. But with NASA’s Europa Clipper, you have that opportunity. Names will ride aboard the spacecraft as it journeys 1.8 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometers) to this icy moon, where an ocean hides beneath a frozen outer shell. The deadline to join the mission’s “Message in a Bottle” campaign is only five weeks away. The campaign closes at 11:59 PM EST, December 31, 2023.

X-rays imaged by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory combined with infrared data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope were used to detect the most distant black hole ever discovered. The extremely distant black hole is located in the galaxy UHZ1 in the direction of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, which was used as a gravitation lens in these observations. Abell 2744 is only about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth. UHZ1 is behind Abell 2744 and much farther away. At some 13.2 billion light-years away, UHZ1 is seen when the universe was only 3% of its current age. These new results may help explain how some of the first supermassive black holes in the Universe formed. It is believed that UHZ1 formed directly from the collapse of a huge cloud of gas rather than from the compression of a huge galaxy, which would not have had time to form this early in the Universe.

Welcome to the night sky report for November 2023 -- Your guide to the constellations, deep sky objects, planets, and celestial events that are observable during the month. This month, hunt for the fainter constellations of fall, including Pisces, Aries, and Triangulum. They will guide you to several galaxies, including the spiral galaxies M74 and M33. Saturn rides high during the month and Venus and Jupiter are visible on opposite sides of the sky. Also, the Leonid meteors peak this month. The night sky is truly a celestial showcase. Get outside and explore its wonders from your own backyard.