91.5 KRCC's Looking Up

This week on Looking Up Hal and Bruce begin a month long salute to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. This July 20 th will mark fifty years since Neil Armstrong took his famous first step on to the surface of the Moon. In honor of that remarkable achievement, all this month Bruce and I are going to focus on topics related to the Moon and our visits there.

Would any given astronomical object still look as cool if it had a different name? Bruce Bookout delves into that very subject on this week's Looking Up. I was once asked at a local star party; how do we know the names of things in the sky? The answer is simple – someone named it.

This week on Looking Up Hal cues us in on a sweet M&M connection in the evening sky. If you have a flat horizon to the west, not necessarily an easy thing to find in Southern Colorado, I urge you to take a look tonight just after sunset, and for the next few nights, to see a beautiful cosmic dance of two planets, Mars and Mercury.

Opportunity is dead. Long live Opportunity! Today, June 10 th , is a somewhat sad yet very satisfying anniversary. You see it was a year ago today that the good folks at NASA were last able to talk to a plucky little robot named Opportunity on the surface of Mars.

After a winter retreat , the king of the planets, at least in this solar system, is back in our night sky. Hal tells us more on this week's episode of Looking Up... Alright, I admit it – sometimes I get a wee bit technical and detailed in these shows, and so this week I want to answer the question many of you may have in mind right now – what the heck is that really bright star in the southeast sky?

This week on Looking Up we're bound for a star that's 50 light years from home. Deep in our southern skies, in the constellation Centarus lies a dead star 50 light-years away from the Earth. V886 Centauri is at first glance an ordinary white dwarf. But it is more than it appears .

Perhaps all that 'core training' Omega Centauri did in the past really paid off. It may very well be all that's left of a small galaxy that collided with the Milky Way a long, long time ago. That's the story Hal has for us on this week's Looking Up. Today I’m going to tell you about a wonderful object in the southern Colorado sky, the amazing Omega Centauri! It isn’t easy to find, and you will have to have a very flat southern horizon to spot this elusive object.

This week on Looking Up Hal heralds the arrival of spring with a tale of a ghostly object. I love the arrival of Spring, with warmer days and nights. But there is one object in the Colorado Spring sky that might fit, at least poetically, in the October sky, the wonderful and beautiful object, the Ghost of Jupiter.

In a continuation from last week's episode of Looking Up, we learn more about the constellation Corvus the Crow. This week Hal spotlights another star in that constellation - Kraz - which seems to be a star that's down on its barium essentials. Some things in our Colorado night sky are fun because we know a lot about them. But there are far more items up in that sky that we really don’t know too much about, yet.

This week, and next on Looking Up, Hal Spends some time on a couple of stars in the Spring / Summer constellation Corvus the Crow. The top star, so to speak, in Corvus is Gienah, at the top of the roughly diamond-shaped constellation. What does the name mean? Well, some say it means “right wing of the crow,” but it shows up as the left wing in some charts. So, we don’t really know.