Western Slope Skies

Stories, such as the one I’ve just shared and many others around the globe, were used to interpret the stars and celestial objects that people have seen sparkling in the night sky.

Throughout history, a belief in the “fixed” and changeless stars was held by many cultures. But at the beginning of the 19th Century, Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi repeatedly measured the position of a star called 61 Cygni. Piazzi’s work overturned such long-held beliefs and led to research that ultimately allowed astronomers to accurately measure the scale of the Milky Way Galaxy and to learn of our location within it.

The Sun has been ‘in the news’ these days. You may have read about various phenomena associated with the Sun, including sunspots, flares, and auroras or Northern Lights. So why all the interest in the Sun now?

AstroFest 2024 will feature dark night skies along the entire Gunnison River corridor from Curecanti National Recreation Area (certified Dark Sky in 2021) all the way to Gunnison Gorge National Conservation Area – celebrating their recent certification as a Dark Sky Place.

Every year, right in the middle of August, my cousins and I drag all our sleeping bags andpillows up to their roof and wait for the sky event that goes highly unnoticed every year: the Perseid meteor shower.

Halos arise from sunlight refraction through microscopic ice crystals, usually aloft in cirrus clouds.

A star begins its life as a cloud of gas and dust. These are called molecular clouds, and they can range between 1,000 to 10 million times the mass of the sun.

A planetary alignment means that 3 or more planets line up in a row, as seen from the Earth, in the same area of the sky, that is, a “parade of planets”. The planets lie ROUGHLY on a line called the ecliptic, the path that the Sun appears to follow against the background of stars as we on Earth orbit the Sun. The parade can be tens of degrees in length.

When a star dies what is left behind is called a stellar remnant. The type of stellar remnant is dependent upon the star’s mass.

Saturn's rings are one of the most astonishing things to see with your own eyes.