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Email: hakes_c@fortlewis.edu
Greetings stargazers. The summer Milky Way is in the sky right after dusk, with the brightest parts toward the constellation Sagittarius. That means this is a good time of year to look for...
DATE: July 27, 2013 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings, stargazers. I recently received some new lights for the Old Fort Lewis campus, where the observatory is. These new lights are to replace the current street/security lights, and once...
DATE: June 22, 2013 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings stargazers. Now that the days are getting warmer, many of us want to get outside more often and even stay outside well into the evening. I find it a little funny that the time of year...
DATE: May 25, 2013 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
Greetings stargazers. For many amateur astronomers with small telescopes, spring is galaxy season. At any moderately dark site, which includes most of the Four Corners, you can see scores of these...
DATE: April 27, 2013 | COLUMN: What's up in Durango Skies
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
