USNO – Astronomy Now

26 September 2023

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[ 11 September 2023 ] The Great Square of Pegasus: heralding autumn News
[ 18 August 2023 ] New comet predicted to brighten rapidly as it sprints Sunwards News
[ 2 August 2023 ] NASA picks up faint carrier signal from Voyager 2 News
[ 31 July 2023 ] Razor-sharp test images show Euclid’s instruments performing as expected News
[ 31 July 2023 ] NASA loses touch with Voyager 2; waits for craft to ‘phone home’ 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.