UNA Planetarium and Observatory

05/05/2026

We will now be pausing our public programs until August. The planetarium will be undergoing a major upgrade, replacing our projector, sound system, repairing our floors and installing new cove lighting,. This will take until mid-August and so we will be shut down for campus programs until then. We are still running our Starlab portable planetarium programs which is available for bookings. We will try to keep everyone up to date with photos as the project progresses. See you in August!

Send a message to learn more

05/05/2026

The planetarium now has two butterfly gardens! We have Verbena, Milkweed, Butterfly W**d and Liatris Spicata, all of which help out butterflies. Many thanks to the UNA grounds crew for doing this.

04/22/2026

To conserve power, engineers at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory have turned off an instrument on Voyager 1 – but the science continues!

Voyager 1 has two remaining science instruments – one that listens to plasma waves and one that measures magnetic fields. Learn more: science.nasa.gov/blogs/voyager

This follows a plan established by the Voyager science and engineering teams years ago which determined the order instruments would be shut off to ensure the mission can continue conducting unique science.

Of the 10 identical sets of instruments that each spacecraft carries, Voyager 1 has two instruments remaining and Voyager 2 has three. See which instruments are still operating: go.nasa.gov/4mDuI0K

04/22/2026

Three Sky Arches over Snowy Alps (APOD: 2026 Apr 21)
Image Credit & Copyright: Angel F*x
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260421.html

Explanation: Why are there three arches across the sky instead of two? Last month, after being dropped off by a helicopter at a high mountain peak in the Alps near the Swiss Italian border, an adventurous astrophotographer expected two arches of our Milky Way galaxy to be visible during the night. These were the inner arch looking in toward the center of our galaxy on the left, visible just before sunrise, and the outer arch on the right visible just after sunset. But there were three arches. The surprised astrophotographer soon realized that the sky was so dark that an entire arc of faint zodiacal light was also noticeable -- sunlight scattered by inner Solar System dust. And it artfully connected the two Milky Way arches! The next morning a helicopter picked the astrophotographer back up, and after 40 hours of processing and combining that night's images, the featured triple-arch 360-degree panorama resulted.

https://www.instagram.com/angelfux

Starship Asterisk* • APOD Discussion Page
https://asterisk.apod.com/discuss_apod.php?date=260421

04/22/2026

Celebrate our spaceship Earth this Thursday and Friday with the beautiful film ‘Birth of Planet Earth’. It’s your last chance to catch a regular season planetarium show before we close for renovations until January 2027. We hope to see you there.

Tickets are a suggested donation of $5 for adults, $3 for children 12 and under. All proceeds go directly to our planetarium’s Delta State Foundation account.

04/01/2026

The Claw and Bubble Nebulae (APOD: 2026 Apr 01)
Image Credit & Copyright: Richard Whitehead Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II)
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260401.html

Explanation: What unexpected things do you see when you look up at the night sky? Today’s image resembles an abstract painting, with large swaths of color strewn across a cosmic canvas seemingly without design. Despite the image's abstract nature, the human mind finds patterns, identifying a large claw reaching up towards a floating bubble. Embedded within these seemingly random structures are the physical laws that govern how light and matter interact. The Claw (Sh2-157) and Bubble (NGC 7635) Nebulae glow colors that are mapped to the yellow and blue shown, indicating the presence of hydrogen and oxygen ionized by the intense light emitted from stars several times the mass of the Sun. This image depicts both the chaos and structure of astronomical processes, showing that a common thread between art and science is to look for the unexpected.

https://richardwhitehead.photography/
https://kerockcliffe.com/
https://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sci/bio/keighley.e.rockcliffe
https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/
https://csst.umbc.edu/directory/
https://cresst2.umd.edu/

Starship Asterisk* • APOD Discussion Page
https://asterisk.apod.com/discuss_apod.php?date=260401

04/01/2026

Spring into spring with this new image of the Cat's Paw Nebula. We expect it to start knocking planets off the counter for sport any minute now.🐾

This "paws-itively" amazing image is roughly 91 light-years across and combines X-ray data from NASA's Chandra & infrared data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

04/01/2026

This feed will provide continuous coverage of Artemis II mission activities with live commentary, beginning with tanking of the SLS (Space Launch System) roc...

03/12/2026

Sky Glows over Paranal Observatory (APOD: 2026 Mar 10)
Image Credit & Copyright: Julien Looten
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260310.html

Explanation: Are lasers from giant telescopes being used to defend the Earth? No. Lasers shot from telescopes are now commonly used to help increase the accuracy of astronomical observations. In some directions, Earth atmosphere-induced fluctuations in starlight can indicate how the air mass over a telescope is changing, but in other directions, no bright star exists. In these directions, astronomers can create an artificial star with a laser. Subsequent observations of the artificial laser guide star can reveal information so detailed about the changing blurring effects of the Earth's atmosphere that much of it can be removed by rapidly flexing a telescope's mirror. Such adaptive optics techniques allow high-resolution ground-based observations of real stars, planets, and nebulas. Pictured here, telescopes at Paranal Observatory in Chile study a colorful sky filled with green airglow and the Magellanic Clouds on the left, red airglow on the right, and the majestic central band of our Milky Way Galaxy arching across the center.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/julienlooten/

Starship Asterisk* • APOD Discussion Page
https://asterisk.apod.com/discuss_apod.php?date=260310

03/03/2026

The Dusty Surroundings of Orion and the Pleiades (APOD: 2026 Mar 02)
Image Credit & Copyright: Ignacio Fernández
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260302.html

Explanation: How well do you know the night sky? OK, but how well can you identify famous sky objects in a very deep image? Either way, here is a test: see if you can find some well-known night-sky icons in a deep image filled with filaments of normally faint dust and gas. This image contains the Pleiades star cluster, Barnard's Loop, Orion Nebula, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse, Witch Head Nebula, Eridanus Loop, and the California Nebula. To find their real locations, here is an annotated image version (in the comments). The reason this task might be difficult is similar to the reason it is initially hard to identify familiar constellations in a very dark sky: the tapestry of our night sky has an extremely deep hidden complexity. The featured composite reveals some of this complexity in a 16 hours of sky exposure in dark skies over Granada, Spain.

https://www.instagram.com/igneis.nightscapes/

Starship Asterisk* • APOD Discussion Page
https://asterisk.apod.com/discuss_apod.php?date=260302