AstroFriday

The San Juan College (SJC) Planetarium’s AstroFriday presentation for September will be “Galaxies,” a 25-minute fulldome planetarium show produced by the Casper Planetarium! Come explore these mysterious, distant celestial bodies in deep space, how they are like our own Milky Way galaxy and how they are different! The fulldome presentation will be followed by a live guided tour of the sky, using the Planetarium’s Digitarium Zeta star projector. We will also give out fall sky maps while supplies last! The show times are at 6:30 and 7:30 p.m. There is no admission charge, but there is a maximum seating capacity of 60 in the planetarium, so seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis. In order to preserve dark-adaption, there is no late admittance into the planetarium once the show has started!

If the weather permits, we will offer a free public stargaze with telescopes at 8:30 p.m. in the courtyard behind the planetarium after the last show. The stargaze will last a maximum of one hour. There is no capacity limit for the stargaze, so please come join us! Since the waning gibbous Moon will be below the horizon and evening planets will be too low to see well, we will focus on deep-sky objects to view, like galaxies, as well as binary stars! We should have a really good view of the colorful gold-and-blue double star, Albireo, and if weather conditions are particularly favorable, we may also see galaxies like Bode’s Galaxy (M81) and the Cigar Galaxy (M82), as well as the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) in Ursa Major! Also potentially visible are such deep-sky objects as the Ring Nebula in Lyra, the globular cluster M13 in Hercules, the Wild Duck Cluster in Aquila, and the “Dumbbell Nebula” M27 in Cygnus.

For more information, please feel free to call David Mayeux at 566-3361, or e-mail at mayeuxd@sanjuancollege.edu. Further information about Planetarium presentations and policies are available on the web on the SJC Planetarium Facebook page, or on the Events page on the SJC website. 

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