Perseid Meteor Star Party August 11/12 The University of Illinois Springfield Astronomy-Physics Program is co-hosting a viewing of the Perseid Meteor…

Pictures of the Moon On May 30 we took a series of pictures of the Moon with our wide-field CCD camera on our 20-inch telescope. Below is the image we…

The Eagle Nebula (M16) The cloudy weather lately has been bad news for Friday Night Star Parties but it has given us some time to reduce a back-log of…

Supernova 2013df in NGC 4414 The spiral galaxy to the left of center in this picture is NGC 4414.  It is about 62 million lightyears away from Earth in the…

Transit of Venus Star Party on June 5, 2012 We will be hosting a special day-time star party at Southwind Park from 5pm to sunset in Springfield, IL to…

Nearby Galaxy M33 This is a composite image of the galaxy M33 in the constellation Triangulum.  It is a collection of 40 billion stars about 3 million…

Supernova Impostors The UIS Barber Observatory has taken advantage of the clear weather patterns and our new wide-field U42 camera to follow the brightness…

The following is an excerpt from a column by University of Illinois Springfield Associate Professor of Astronomy-Physics John Martin. This column appeared in…