Free Public Stargazing at the Montgomery Hill Observatory, May 9, 2025

Hi All,
Enjoy a free public stargazing event at the Montgomery Hill Observatory from 8:30 pm - 10:30 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 telescope focusing on M13 “The Great Cluster in Hercules” one of the finest spring nights globular cluster. Globular clusters are densely packed collections of ancient stars. Roughly spherical in shape, they contain hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of stars.

The Earth natural satellite the Moon will be in the waxing gibbous phase, about 94% illuminated. It will be in the heart of the constellation Virgo, the Moon was formed 4.5 billion years ago when a object about the size of Mars collided with the young Earth. All the rocky debris from this collision eventually formed the Moon.

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.

We can view many galaxies tonight with our new Unistellar eVscope, M 66 Leo Triplet Galaxy group, M64 the Black Eye Galaxy, NGC 4631 the Whale Galaxy, M 87 Virgo Galaxy, NGC 4651 the Umbrella Galaxy, and many more.

Keep looking up you’re bound to fine something new.
Rick Francisco
Parking: Free Parking after 6:00 PM in the parking lot #9A for this event.

EVC map:https://www.evc.edu/sites/default/files/2022-03/evc_campus_map.pdf