When people hear the name “Edwin Hubble,” they typically think of the Hubble Space Telescope. However, the Hubble Space Telescope was built after Edwin Hubble’s death as a way to honor him.

The concept of scotobiology as a science was developed at a conference on light pollution held in Muskoka, Ontario, in 2003. Just as the word “photo” relates to light, “scoto” is the word that relates to “darkness.” Therefore, Scotobiology is the study of the role darkness plays in living organisms.

Have you ever wished upon a shooting star? For most of us, the novelty of wishing on a shooting star has faded since the days of our childhood.

The telescope’s most important discovery to date has been finding the farthest black hole located at the center of a rare type of galaxy.

On September 26, 2022, a NASA spacecraft ran into the asteroid Dimorphos at nearly 15,000 miles per hour. Far from being a multi-million-dollar boondoggle, this collision is precisely what astronomers had planned. The spacecraft was part of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, or DART for short. The goal: to test technology that could potentially divert a large asteroid, should we ever locate one on a collision course with Earth.

From June 7-11, we will hold our first ever StarFest to celebrate Lake City’s starry skies and gather other dark sky advocates and interested folks from the western slope, the San Luis Valley, and throughout Colorado to see what more can be done to assure our precious night skies can be enjoyed by future generations. Unfortunately, light pollution is getting worse around the world so taking action is critical to turning things around.

Gleaming naked-eye apparition, Venus has captivated civilization since antiquity, garnering epithets of divine power and beauty-- Chac-Ek (“Great Star”) in Mayan, Jin-xing (“Golden Planet”) in Chinese, Phosphoros (“Lightbringer”) in Greek.

Back when our beloved western cities were still young and their skies still dark, customers waited weeks or even months for basic household items to reach their local mercantile shelves.

Imagine being a poor 13-year old boy living in France in 1744 and observing a 6-tailed comet in the daytime. What aspirations might that have generated in a teenager?

The name Milky Way means two things: the star-packed photogenic river of stars across sky for one. It also refers to the hundreds of billions of stars that make up our galaxy. No matter where you look in the Western Slope sky, every star is part of our galaxy.