USNO – Astronomy Now

25 May 2022

Latest News

[ 12 May 2022 ] Milky Way’s supermassive black hole shines in stunning first portrait News
[ 9 May 2022 ] Webb optical alignment complete and virtually perfect News
[ 2 May 2022 ] Ingenuity zooms over Mars rover’s discarded parachute and backshell News
[ 14 April 2022 ] The largest comet ever seen has been measured – and it’s a whopper News
[ 21 March 2022 ] Webb optics alignment achieves near perfect focus 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.