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: Feb. 2nd, 2026.
What a compact looking month February will be this year! It’s exactly 4 weeks in 4 rows!
We will start the night with a quick glance at Jupiter at 7 pm in which its moon Io will just be finishing its transit across its surface and Io’s shadow will still be visible upon the giant planet until 7:39 pm that night. There will also be to see M45 the Pleiades open cluster. And can see Orion’s Great Nebula and its “lost jewel” NGC 1980. We’ll look in “Cluster 37” (NGC 2169). Plus, there will be M35 Gemini’s great open cluster.
We hoped to include hosting a Launch Watch Party for NASA’s SLS/Artemis II rocket on Feb. 6th. However, the arctic cold air delayed NASA’s wet dress rehearsal tests, and then a small leak in the umbilical line exceeded their safety limits. So now, the launch is currently scheduled for Friday, March 6th, starting at 8:29 pm, with only a 2 hour launch window. This sounds perfect for a launch party then! Further details will come later. When it does go off, the great rocket will be quite a sight to see go off in the dark night sky. The schedule may further change as the folks at the Kennedy Space Center go through their checks after fueling the rocket and need be, then the launch day will get shifted forwards. At this point, we don’t know exactly when this will be. They are shooting for launches that will have it occur around the 3rd quarter Moon phase. Once launched, they plan for a day’s worth of testing the Orion spacecraft Integrity , which includes rendezvous and docking tests just like they did during the Gemini missions, before making the 4 day trip out to the Moon. This will then be during the Moon’s new phase, giving the astronauts a view of the fully lit far side of the Moon. They’ll whip around the Moon by its gravity, called a “free return trajectory” and head back to Earth for landing. All the while, they’ll run biology tests on themselves and run tests on the spacecraft.
Whenever they do decide to launch, we wish them a productive and safe voyage and return home.
