By David H. Levy As twilight deepens these evenings, Orion is just clearing the eastern horizon. Robert Frost wrote eloquently in his famous poem “The Star Splitter, “You know Orion always comes up sideways,Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains.” Whenever I see Orion rising, which is almost every night from fall to midwinter, I am reminded...
By David H. Levy Not long ago OSIRIS-REx, a spacecraft sponsored by the University of Arizona and flown by NASA, gently touched the surface of asteroid No. 101955, an asteroid named Bennu, tried to grab some material, and then quickly took off again. It was the first try, but it was a huge success! The craft gathered more than twice what was...
Skyward: September 2020 By David H. Levy A few months ago I wrote in this space about Comet Atlas (C/2019 Y4), a comet that at the time showed signs of becoming a bright comet visible without a telescope or binoculars with just one’s eyes. I also repeated my maxim that “Comets are like cats; they both have tails, and they both do precisely...
By David Levy By a long shot, the best way to get into and enjoy astronomy is to become affiliated with your local astronomy club. Not only do you get access to a ton of knowledge about how to find constellations, and to choose and use your first telescope, but also you get a firsthand look at what is happening in the sky from the people who...
By David Levy A number of years ago, my friend Scott Roberts, then of Meade Instruments, sent Wendee and me two small “ETX” telescopes. We brought them both out to a picnic table we had set up in the yard to the south of our home. We turned on their motors and quickly learned how to move them across the sky; as it was Wendee’s first...
By David Levy Plenty of telescopes grace my observatory, but I still enjoy watching shooting stars, or meteors, more than anything else. This year, after a break of several months, the Earth passed through the Lyrid meteor stream on the night of April 21. The meteor shower takes place when the Earth encounters dust from Comet Thatcher...
By David Levy Just a week before Christmas 1844, a sea captain named Wilmot discovered a bright comet without using a telescope. The comet...
By David Levy Ever since I saw my first major display of the northern lights on July 8, 1966, I have been fascinated and delighted by this always-welcome show of greenish lights in the sky. But of all the displays I’ve seen, few can match the thrill of watching them from an airplane cruising high above the Arctic circle. In January 2020, I was...
By David Levy Something old, something new…Eureka instead of Echo. This is the story of my first telescope, of the comet it did not discover (and which later collided with Jupiter), and the telescope that replaced it. Although this story has been building for almost sixty years, it came to a head last fall. First, in late October, I got a brand...
By David H. Levy First Light. For those of us who are not astronomers, the phrase first light means dawn. If we are up early to go fishing, hunting, or to search for a missing person, we awake at first light. For skywatchers, first light has an entirely different meaning. Instead, it celebrates the first time starlight enters a new telescope or...
