Of the ten first-magnitude stars in the heavens, eight of them will surround the Moon. You’ll notice that the star directly below the Moon is also the very brightest. This blue gem is the famous Dog Star: Sirius. It also happens to be the very closest star we can ever see from New York State.
The 1918 pandemic killed as many people in one year as the Black Death claimed in a century. But it generated surprisingly few headlines at the time. The pandemic’s casualties blurred together in the public mind with those who never returned from the great European bloodbath, which perhaps explains why Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing best-selling novels in the years immediately following the Spanish flu pandemic, never mentioned the disease even once. Moreover, the pandemic lacked a punchy name.
From our un-light-polluted region, binoculars pointed at the belt show it immersed in a multitude of little stars, like a swarm of fireflies.
Venus, Mars and moonless meteors will pay us visits in the coming year.
As Hawaii resumes H-bomb air raid warnings, and nuclear brinksmanship continues, we take a further look at what a strike on New York City would mean for the Hudson Valley.
Night Sky columnist Bob Berman has two telescopes that he wants to give away to stargazers who need them.
Seven+ sinister sisters watch over our Halloween rituals. Halloween’s date actually revolved around the Pleiades.
When the universe’s first- and fourth-most-abundant elements combine, the result is often a gas that, surprisingly, has recently cleaned up our air. It’s methane. Most folks call it natural gas. It’s also known as marsh gas and swamp gas, since it’s released by decomposing plants.
Very thin cirrus can be invisible, and here is where their magic can truly shine. Occasionally at this time of year, when the Sun is lowish but not extremely low, look overhead and you may see an upside-down rainbow called a circumzenithal arc.
Through binoculars, the 3,000 stars visible to the naked eye on the clearest night in the Catskills jump to 30,000.