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: Aug 3 rd , 2026.
For the first session to Friday August 7th
Below is shown what our sky would be like by 9:15 pm on the 7th. The main bright objects of our Galaxy are rising up to meet us then. The multitude of its interesting objects are beginning to become apparent to us as the green circles you see in the image below, though they are challenged by the light pollution from the surrounding cities. In the western horizon, the only planet to notice is bright Venus next to Virgo’s outstretched left arm and her star Zavijava as her left hand.
In the west, we see the noticeably bright planet Venus. On the 9th, it will be 0.727734 au away from us and basically be equidistant from us as it is from the Sun. As we are 1 au away from the Sun, then you should be able to envision it at the right angle of a 45°-45°-90° triangle. Hence, when reaching its greatest elongation (angular distance) from the Sun, it will look like a 1st quarter Moon in the sky. I once showed a small boy the planet through a telescope in a similar phase years ago and he declared “It’s a moon!”
Know that this would be an impossible view according to ancient Ptolemy, who wrote the Almagest, had insisted that it orbited on an epicycle around a fixed midpoint between the Earth and the Sun. But Galileo argued that if Venus did so, then all we would ever see of it would be a thin lit section, like a crescent phase, as we would forever look at mostly its night side. So, in order for us to see Venus lit up by over half its surface like we will those nights, both Galileo and Copernicus argued that it must be coming toward us from the far side of the solar system as it orbits the Sun. So, viewing Venus early in the evening will give you a chance to personally eyewitness proof that the Earth is not at the center of the solar system!
If the sky is cooperative and we’re ambitious, we can try for the variety of galaxies later on, such as M84, 86, 87, 89, 58, 60. There will also be globular clusters, such as M53, NGC5634 in Virgo, NGC4590 in Hydra, NGC 5897 in Libra, M5 in Serpens Caput. And still later on, M13 & M92 in Hercules. M57, the Ring Nebula, in Lyra. And the apparent, two colored stars (blue and gold, like the Ukrainian flag) called Alberio, the swan’s beak, in Cygnus.
