By 7:30pm on November 7, I was already a pretty happy stargazer. I had been out for an hour and a half with a good astrobuddy touring the clusters, galaxies, and nebulas of the autumn sky at a dark site near Governor Dodge State Park. Our hands and feet were getting...
Two special events this month let us experience the Moon and planets moving across the sky. We are familiar with the daily motion of Sun and Moon and stars and planets rising in the east and setting in the west as our planet rotates about its axis. But we can also...
We think of evening as the ideal time for stargazing. The sun sets, the sky darkens, and one by one the stars and planets emerge. If you look to the east just after sunset, you can see Earth’s shadow just above the horizon. Darkness does not fall—it rises! We spend...
There’s a little bit of showmanship in sharing stargazing. It helps to be mindful that other people might not be quite as wowed as you are by the sight of a faint fuzzy thing in the eyepiece of a telescope (even if it is the combined light of hundreds of billions of...
The warm nights ahead are a great time to get to explore our dark skies. There are plenty of opportunities this summer in the Driftless Area to have a look through a telescope. If you have been meaning to explore our starry skies, this is your summer. Kickapoo Valley...
