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Email: hakes_c@fortlewis.edu
Greetings stargazers. Charles Messier (1730-1817) was a French comet hunter. While he did discover 13 comets, his more famous contribution to astronomy was a list he made of objects that were not...
DATE: March 23, 2013 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings stargazers. It will be hard to write this months article without mentioning the recent event in Chelyabinsk, Russia, so lets get that one out of the way first. Yes, it was a coincidence...
DATE: Feb. 22, 2013 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings stargazers. Jupiter is high overhead now. Except for the moon, it will be the brightest thing in the evening sky this month, and is a good pointer to part of a rather large asterism. An...
DATE: Jan. 26, 2013 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings stargazers. It is a good thing you are reading this it means we entered the next Maya calendar baktun with fewer disruptions than the Y2K computer glitches that threatened...
DATE: Dec. 22, 2012 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings, stargazers. This is the time of year retailers love, and many of you might be in the market for a new gadget to help with your stargazing endeavors. Thinking of a telescope? By far, the...
DATE: Nov. 24, 2012 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings stargazers. Navigating by the stars is not very common in these days of GPS-enabled cellphones, but if you want to enjoy the sky from an unfamiliar location, it is often useful to be able...
DATE: Oct. 25, 2012 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings stargazers. Happy belated Equinox Day. One of the biggest misconceptions, even among educated people, is that the reason for the seasons is that Earth moves closer to the sun in summer,...
DATE: Sept. 22, 2012 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings, stargazers. In a previous article about the magnitude scale, I mentioned the bright stars Vega and Arcturus. They still are both overhead, but now shifted significantly to the west....
DATE: Aug. 25, 2012 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings stargazers. When people tell me they want to learn the night sky, what they often mean is they want to learn to identify the constellations they can see. There are 88 constellations in...
DATE: July 21, 2012 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings, stargazers. This is the time of year when the brightest part of the Milky Way is rising in the east. Although the Milky Way indeed contains billions of stars, how many of those stars can...
DATE: June 23, 2012 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings stargazers. Last month I talked briefly about the astronomer Johannes Kepler, and his contributions to astronomy by describing the motions of the planets. This month I will talk about a...
DATE: May 26, 2012 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings, stargazers. Predicting the future is a tricky business. However, quite often that is exactly what scientists do. Understanding the way the universe works allows them to be able to...
DATE: April 21, 2012 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
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