Messier Marathon – The Sky Tonight

It’s the first week of the month. You know what that means… it’s time for The Sky Tonight!

The Sky Tonight

The Sky Tonight is held in person at the Fleet Science Center the first Wednesday night of every month and the second Sunday in the Heikoff Giant Dome Theater in Balboa Park. And if you can’t join us in person, join us for The Sky Tonight: Virtual Edition on the third Wednesday at 7 PM. We’ll make sure you see all the same beautiful images as the audience under the dome. And these shows are pay-as-you-wish! From free to $20, with any amount going to support events like these. Just make sure you register in advance so you can receive the Zoom link.

The Sky Tonight show takes the audience on a tour of the night sky, and then we focus on a specific topic. This month, we’ll discuss the Messier Marathon!

What will you see?

After a sky tour, we’ll discuss the Messier Marathon, basically an excuse for me to show a lot of pretty images. The Messier Catalog was created in the late 1700s to document fuzzy objects in the sky that were not comets. Nowadays, it serves as a catalog of beautiful celestial objects which are visible through binoculars or small telescopes, and some are even detectable with the naked eye! The Messier Marathon refers to the fact that, in March/April, on the night of the new moon, you can observe the entire catalog if you start at sunset and end at sunrise. Fun!

Hopefully we’ll see you soon at The Sky Tonight and other events at the Fleet Science Center.

Wishing you clear skies!

The Fleet Science Center posted their virtual events from the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, including several of our Sky Tonight shows. Check them out here.

If you’re interested, check out this post about a supernova that was visible in Messier 101 last year – https://lisawillspace.com/2023/05/supernova-in-the-pinwheel/