Hi All,
Enjoy a free public stargazing event at the Montgomery Hill Observatory from 8:45 pm to 11:30 pm. View the skies with our two observatories and several telescopes set out for the public. Kids learn how to use telescopes and identify objects in the sky!
For this evening the mighty Hercules will be rising in the eastern night sky, see if you see the keystone stars of this constellation. We’ll have one of the observatory telescopes focusing on M13 “The Great Cluster in Hercules” one of the finest spring night globular clusters. Globular clusters are densely packed collections of ancient stars. Roughly spherical, they contain hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of stars.
The Summer Triangle is an asterism formed by Vega, Altair and Deneb, the brightest stars of the northern constellations Lyra, Aquila and Cynus. With three first-magnitude stars at its vertices, the asterism dominates the summer sky in the northern hemisphere. It helps identify the three bright stars and their constellations, as well as find the many bright deep sky objects that lie in this area of the sky.
Look for the Constellation Lyra where you can find the Ring Nebula (M 57) a planetary nebula that looks like a ring of smoke. The original star that created the Ring Nebula is thought to have been several times more massive than our sun but not large enough to explode as a supernova. This will happen to our star the Sun in 5 billion years, so we have plenty of time to find a new home.
Did everyone enjoy the new "eVscope" last month please let us know so we can plan to have more objects planned for the evening. Here is a list of DSO (Deep Space Object) we plan to view this evening, M66 Leo Triplet galaxies, NGC 4676 Mice galaxy, M4 Globular star cluster, NGC 7000 North America nebula, NGC 6888 Crescent nebula and, M64 Black-Eye galaxy.
Keep looking up; you're bound to find something new.
Rick Francisco
For questions, contact Rick Francisco at ricardo.francisco@evc.edu
Parking: Free Parking after 6:00 PM in parking lot #9 for this event.
