Australian Sky & Telescope

ONE OF THE JOYS OF ASTRONOMY is that the non-professional has always had an opportunity to take part in scientific research. From the days of the self-funded ‘gentleman astronomer’ to the era of coordinated amateur observing programs run by the likes

ASTRONOMERS HAVE FOUND a way to use quasars to measure the evolution of dark energy, the repulsive pressure that accelerates our universe’s expansion. The results, which appeared January 28 in Nature Astronomy, have potentially far-reaching implicati

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN Queensland’s (USQ) Mount Kent Observatory is being expanded to help it continue its astronomical work, including in the hunt for exoplanets. Once the expansion is complete, the expanded $6 million facility will have a total

PLANETARY SCIENTISTS HAVE realised that the upper cloud layer at Jupiter’s equator clears out in a predictable cycle. What’s more, professionals and amateurs alike confirm that the planet is now undergoing another cloud-clearing event. A team of scie

A new radio array, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), has spotted 13 new fast radio bursts (FRBs) — including the second one known to repeat. These mysterious flashes probably occur thousands of times per day, but they’re so

ASTRONOMERS AT THE WINTER have proposed contrasting scenarios to explain a strange celestial blast spotted last year. Did a medium-mass black hole tear a white dwarf apart, or are we seeing a new type of supernova? The robotic Asteroid Terrestrial-im

It makes historical sense to start with Castor, or Alpha (α) Geminorum. Except for the period from 1963 to 1973 when the components were less than 2” apart, Castor has been (and will remain) an accessible binary for smaller telescopes. Although a spe

Carl Sagan once wrote of the Earth surrounded by space as “a meadow in the middle of the sky”. I’ve written in this column previously about a different “meadow in the middle of the sky”. The meadow in question is the section of heavens bounded by the

Mercury (mag. –0.9, dia. 5.3” in mid-May) begins May low in the eastern, morning sky, before being lost in the solar glare as it heads for superior conjunction (ie. on the other side of the Sun) on May 21. Look for Venus and the 27-day-old thin cresc

At the time of writing, May and June are shaping up as rather bleak months for the visual comet observer this year, with nothing predicted to be brighter than magnitude 14 or thereabouts. Yet, even if there is nothing very exciting in store for us vi

Although Ceres lacks a permanent atmosphere, astronomers have detected an exosphere, a thin layer of water vapour enshrouding the asteroid. But the water signatures appear to be variable rather than permanent, sometimes detectable, sometimes not. Ear

My fascination with billion-light-year galaxies began nearly 40 years ago when I read about the fabulously rich and distant Corona Borealis Cluster (Abell 2065) in Burnham’s Celestial Handbook. The cluster features several hundred elliptical (E) and

WHEN JACK FRILLMAN was preparing to watch the August 2017 total solar eclipse, he knew he didn’t want to waste precious totality time fussing with camera gear. So he designed and built a camera controller that would automate the entire process of pho

There are plenty of activities planned for the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing of Apollo 11, around Australia and around the world. Here are some of the major local events you can look forward to. In Brisbane, the NASA – A Human Adventure exhib