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The Wilderness Above (astronomy)

Your guide to the best astronomy books

As much as I love looking at the night sky, my love for astronomy really grew with the books I read. People often ask what books I would recommend for those interested in the subject, so this list contains some of my favorites. It has a combination of non-fiction, science fiction and a few ...

Guide to stargazing: the Milky Way

In my last column, I highlighted some of the best objects to view in the night sky through the end of the year. However, becoming a confident stargazer takes more than a list of targets: it requires an understanding of the patterns and paths that shape the night sky. When stargazing, ...

Guide to the Adirondack skies: Planets, comets and more

The Adirondack Sky Center & Observatory is thrilled to be your guide to the skies. In this column, I’ll be clarifying some of the terms used in astronomy and discussing what will be in the night sky through the end of the year. This includes planets, moons, comets and more. Some of ...

Of clocks and calendars

It’s most likely that none of us has completely adjusted to Daylight Saving Time (DST, or Eastern Daylight Time for us ... EDT) after moving our clocks forward an hour early Sunday morning. Each time we change the clocks to daylight time in the spring and back to standard time in the late ...

The Orion molecular cloud complex

On Feb. 17, Edward Guinan of Villanova University, who has been closely watching Betelgeuse, reported that it has stopped the dimming I described in my column of Feb.1. It is remarkably dimmer, 36% below normal, than any of us have ever seen. Astronomers now expect the giant start to slowly ...

Betelgeuse is fading

The large, bright, glittering constellations of winter illuminate our southern sky in the early evenings of February. As shown in Figure 1, at 8 p.m., Orion stands high in the south above Tupper Lake. Stretching 30 degrees vertically and about 20 degrees horizontally, it is one of the ...