In 1610, Galileo's telescope revealed that the milky smear across the night sky is not a nebula but a field of tiny stars. Immanuel Kent guessed that the stars form a rotating disk and that the Earth is inside it.

It's dark at 7pm now

I saw neither meteors nor auroras from my yard. I'd like to speak with the manager.

A dense ball of 10.5 million stars, Omega Centauri is the biggest and brightest of about 200 globular clusters in the Milky Way galaxy. The average distance between its stars is just one tenth of a light year.

Amazing how much better the garden looks when it rains

It's Too Hot

Comet Encke was "discovered" in 1786, 1795,1805, and 1818 by different astronomers. These comets were found to be the same only after orbital calculations in 1819 by the German astronomer Johann Encke, who then predicted its return in 1822.

Floating in an inner tube on a pond in Maine

Watch Out For Trees

Retrograde motion is an effect of changing perspective. Inferior planets Mercury and Venus show retrograde motion on either side of inferior conjunction. They "overtake" Earth as they pass between Earth and the Sun.