17 Jul, 2017

Utah’s most impressive astronomical event since the Big Bang happens Saturday, when Mike Clements' immense telescope and the new Kolob Observatory housing it are dedicated. The public and media will be welcome at the inauguration of the world’s largest amateur telescope, Saturday at the Stansbury Park Observatory Complex (SPOC), which is operated by the Salt Lake Astronomical Society. Ribbon-cutting, speeches, a chance to mingle with the telescope's builder and backers, and a free star party

07 Jul, 2017

If I had to make a prediction about next month’s total solar eclipse, it would be a cautious one that the corona will be thick around the Sun’s equator and thin at the poles. The reason involves sunspots. These are transitory dark splotches on the Sun, places where the magnetic field pushes through the photosphere. The photosphere is the Sun’s visible surface, a layer only about 60 miles deep -- a thin skin compared with our star’s diameter of 870,000 miles. Sunspots, which have magnetic

27 Jun, 2017

A dazzling gem of the nighttime summer sky is the Lagoon Nebula, a gigantic star-nest relatively near our planet (as cosmic distances go). It's bright enough that from a dark site, a person supposedly can see it with unaided eyes, toward the lower part of the southern Milky Way. During a visit this week to a site that Utah astronomers call Pit ‘n Pole, in Tooele County, I was awed by the beauty of the night sky: Jupiter blazed as it sank in the west and the Milky Way stood up from the south

17 Jun, 2017

Every day we live with our local star, sometimes squinting at it for a moment at noon, often watching it set amid glorious pastels in the evening, occasionally aware of its shimmer through rainclouds during storms -- but how many have truly seen the sun? Its strange arches called prominences and the whitish atmosphere of beyond-scalding-hot gas extend far past the dazzling disk, but we almost never observe them because sunlight is so powerful that it completely hides these other