Welcome to the Observatory's Front Page. Included here are some of the latest news and articles that may be of interest to our visitors.
FAU's Astronomical Observatory is housed under a four meter diameter dome on the Boca Raton campus of Florida Atlantic University. We welcome students, faculty, staff and members of the general public to join our scheduled observations or our public viewing events. Our telescope is mounted on a small platform, at the top of stairs, looking out of the roof of our building, over Boca Raton, to space and beyond!
Section updated: Apr. 28th, 2025.
For the early night hours of the month of May, our Milky Way galaxy will lie near our horizon, if we could see it. That means that its stars in our spring sky appear rather sparce and our overhead views then, look out “above our galaxy’s main plane” to those galaxies beyond.
Target Observations for Friday May 2nd's Public Viewing Session:
The growing daylight directs our attention to the spring sky. This region is chock full of interesting things to see, such as the distant "intergalactic wandering" globular cluster (NGC 2419, Lynx), the "UFO Galaxy" (NGC 2683, Lynx), the 41 ly distant star ρ1 Canceri (55 Cnc or Copernicus) which is an exoplanetary system, Castor (a triple binary star system) and Pollux (the closest red giant star to us) in Gemini & its "Eskimo Nebula" (NGC 2392), open clusters M48 and M67. We’ll check upon T Corona Borealis’ status and look at the globular clusters of M3 in Canes Venatici, M5 in Serpens Caput and Hercules’ M13. Depending upon the conditions, there will be a few galaxies that we’ll try for that night.
There will be an almost first quarter Moon that night which will be in the constellations of Gemini. The planet Mars will be in the constellation Cancer, right next to M44, Praesepe, aka the “Beehive cluster”. The planet will be oriented to show the Meridini planum and Valles Marineris.
Tuesday May 6th': Eta Aquarids Pre-dawn Meteor Shower
The η-Aquarids Meteor Shower will peak in the predawn skies of May the 6th. Its meteors will streak across the whole sky, so you’ll want to get away from lights and out into the open, so you can see much of the above. If you “trace them backwards”, you’ll see that the meteors will seem to emerge from a point that centers near the star labeled η (“eta”) in Aquarius. The source of these meteors is the comet Halley. It peaks at about 55 meteors per hour, but this varies, depending on its streams’ outputs. The comet gets to its greatest distance away from the Sun out to nearly the orbit of Pluto. So, when it falls sunwards, it gains speed and by the time it crosses the Earth’s orbit, it travels quite fast at 41.5 km/s (25.8 miles/sec), retrograde. Which means that we’ll be in a near head-on collision with its icy particles and they will zip across our skies as brighter than average meteors traveling at 66 km/s (41 miles/sec)! They are a little odd in that they appear in Aquarius early compared to other showers that radiate from that constellation during the summertime. Our Moon will have set by their peak times, so they should provide a good show this year.
