USNO – Astronomy Now

2 August 2021

Latest News

[ 28 July 2021 ] “Mountains” on neutron stars just fractions of a millimetre tall News
[ 27 July 2021 ] InSight finds frigid Mars has molten core News
[ 24 July 2021 ] In a first, ALMA spies huge moon-forming disc around exoplanet News
[ 23 July 2021 ] Perseverance Mars rover poised to collect first rock samples News
[ 17 July 2021 ] Whew! Hubble Space Telescope back in operation News

Find Martian moons Phobos and Deimos at the Red Planet’s closest approach

30 July 2018 Ade Ashford

Do you like extreme observing challenges? If you own a quality telescope of 25-cm (10-inch) aperture or larger and have excellent sky conditions, then you might just glimpse Phobos and Deimos, the diminutive moons of Mars around the time that the Red Planet is closest to Earth on 31 July.

U. S. Naval Observatory releases 228 million-star catalogue

27 April 2015 Astronomy Now

The United States Naval Observatory’s Robotic Astrometric Telescope (URAT) near Flagstaff, Arizona began to systematically image the sky every clear night for a period of just over two years, culminating in the URAT1 catalogue of precise positional data on about 228 million stars.