As we get deeper into spring, the winter constellations fade away into the glare of the setting Sun, and the spring constellations get higher in the evening sky. Although the spring constellations are not quite as bright or as familiar as the winter constellations, they do have one special guest: Saturn.

Saturn is one of the best objects in the entire sky to view through a telescope. I've heard people say it looks "fake" or like a sticker when they see it for the first time, because it looks just like it does in all the pictures. With a relatively small telescope, you can easily make out Saturn's famous rings, and possibly a few of its moons.

Saturn moves relatively slowly around the Sun, taking about 30 years to make a full orbit. Because it takes so long to orbit, it moves slowly relative to the background stars and constellations. Right now, Saturn is in Leo and will not move past Leo’s boundaries for over a year, when it moves into Virgo.

To find

Greetings from Ocracoke! Another Morehead educator and I are teaching a weeklong astronomy seminar for the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT). If you have friends or family who are North Carolina public school teachers who haven’t been to an NCCAT renewal seminar, please tell them to check it out.

This is it! The biggest astronomical event of the year: a total lunar eclipse on Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008.

The eclipse’s timing is great for east coast skywatchers. The Moon will start to move into the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow at 8:43 p.m. It will slowly be enveloped by the Earth’s shadow until it is totally eclipsed at 10:01 p.m. Totality will last until 10:51 p.m. By 12:09 a.m., it will have moved out of the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow.

Morehead Planetarium and Science Center is holding a skywatching session around our Sundial at 

Back in August of 2003, Earth passed within 35 million miles of Mars. It the closest the two planets had been in the past 60,000 years. The event made headlines around the world, and we hosted "MarsFest" here at Morehead Planetarium and Science Center. What the news stories didn’t tell you is that Earth actually gets relatively close to Mars every 2.2 years when Earth “laps” Mars as the planets orbit around the Sun. The distance at each close pass ranges between 35 and 60 million miles.

There has been a popular chain email floating around the internet since the 2003 event about a “Mars Spectacular” occurring in August of each year. Here at Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, we call it the "Mars Hoax Email." When it was first emailed it was innocent and accurate enough, with one poorly constructed sentence:

“At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full Moon to the naked eye.”

It’s time for the annual Geminid meteor shower! I’ll cut to the chase and tell you the logistics of watching this consistently impressive meteor shower. If you’d like to learn about the science of meteors and meteor showers, please watch December's Carolina Skies video segment.

The 2007 Geminid meteor shower peaks at about Noon EST on Friday, December 14. The best time to watch is very early Friday morning, from 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. If you don’t feel like being awake during those hours, Thursday night and Friday night should be good too. Morehead Planetarium and Science Center is hosting its monthly skywatching session on Friday evening from 9-11 p.m. at Jordan Lake’s Ebenezer Church Recreation Area. For directions to the site and future skywatching session dates, please visit

I’m blogging from San Francisco today – where it has been mostly cloudy for the past few days. Even if I could see the stars, the view of the night sky wouldn’t be noticeably different than North Carolina’s, since the Raleigh and San Francisco are at similar latitudes (36 degrees and 38 degrees, respectively).

Morehead Planetarium and Science Center’s next monthly skywatching session is this Saturday, November 10 from 6-8 p.m. As usual, the session will be held at Jordan Lake’s Ebenezer Church Recreation Area. This month we are also holding a special skywatching session together with CHAOS (Chapel Hill Astronomical and Observational Society) on Friday, November 9 from 7-9 p.m. at Little River Regional Park. For directions and more information, please visit Morehead’s skywatching session webpage.