Want to learn more about astronomy from the comfort of your own desk chair? Here are my top 10 favorite websites (in no particular order):

www.stellarium.org - Stellarium is a free program that simulates the night sky on your computer. You can choose any location on Earth, a date and time, and you'll be presented with a simulated sky. Stellarium also allows you to zoom in on the night sky. I recommend zooming in on Jupiter or Saturn. I use this frequently, especially to cram right before a planetarium presentation.

www.shatters.net/celestia/ - Similar to Stellarium, it simulates the night sky. It's not as user friendly as Stellarium, but Celestia lets you virtually fly through the Universe. So, that's pretty cool.

www.heavens-above.com - Heavens Above is a website that allows you to get information

You can see the international space station from your backyard! You just have to know when to look. Passes last only a few minutes, and the ISS will look like a bright star moving across the sky.

Visit NASA's page for ISS Passes for North Carolina cities and click on the city closest to you to find out what times within the next 10 days or so that the ISS will be visible.

It will compute a few columns of data for you. "Duration" is how long (in minutes) that the pass will last. "Max Elev" is the maximum height (in degrees) that the ISS will reach over the horizon (measured from 0 to 90 degrees). "Approach" tells you where it will be at the beginning of the pass, and "Departure" tells you where it will be at the end of the pass. With that information, you can get a pretty good idea of when and where

As we get deeper into spring, the winter constellations fade away into the glare of the setting Sun, and the spring constellations get higher in the evening sky. Although the spring constellations are not quite as bright or as familiar as the winter constellations, they do have one special guest: Saturn.

Saturn is one of the best objects in the entire sky to view through a telescope. I've heard people say it looks "fake" or like a sticker when they see it for the first time, because it looks just like it does in all the pictures. With a relatively small telescope, you can easily make out Saturn's famous rings, and possibly a few of its moons.

Saturn moves relatively slowly around the Sun, taking about 30 years to make a full orbit. Because it takes so long to orbit, it moves slowly relative to the background stars and constellations. Right now, Saturn is in Leo and will not move past Leo’s boundaries for over a year, when it moves into Virgo.

To find

Greetings from Ocracoke! Another Morehead educator and I are teaching a weeklong astronomy seminar for the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT). If you have friends or family who are North Carolina public school teachers who haven’t been to an NCCAT renewal seminar, please tell them to check it out.

This is it! The biggest astronomical event of the year: a total lunar eclipse on Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008.

The eclipse’s timing is great for east coast skywatchers. The Moon will start to move into the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow at 8:43 p.m. It will slowly be enveloped by the Earth’s shadow until it is totally eclipsed at 10:01 p.m. Totality will last until 10:51 p.m. By 12:09 a.m., it will have moved out of the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow.

Morehead Planetarium and Science Center is holding a skywatching session around our Sundial at 

Back in August of 2003, Earth passed within 35 million miles of Mars. It the closest the two planets had been in the past 60,000 years. The event made headlines around the world, and we hosted "MarsFest" here at Morehead Planetarium and Science Center. What the news stories didn’t tell you is that Earth actually gets relatively close to Mars every 2.2 years when Earth “laps” Mars as the planets orbit around the Sun. The distance at each close pass ranges between 35 and 60 million miles.

There has been a popular chain email floating around the internet since the 2003 event about a “Mars Spectacular” occurring in August of each year. Here at Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, we call it the "Mars Hoax Email." When it was first emailed it was innocent and accurate enough, with one poorly constructed sentence:

“At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full Moon to the naked eye.”