Dark Ranger Telescope Tours

05/10/2026

The Supernova in the Splinter Galaxy is still bright enough we will be again watching it thru our BIG telescopes tonight, despite it being 56 million light years away!

https://www.facebook.com/share/18nMwYB7jF/

Unfortunately, we are booked to overflowing tonight, but there is plenty of room still left on Sunday's public telescope tour.

Book now to see this and many other amazing independent galaxies, and galaxies merging! After all this the Great Galactic Season -- when the Milky-in-the-Way is out of the way until about 1:00am.

https://www.darkrangertelescopetours.com/public.html

We’re watching a star exploding millions of light-years away. Team Celestron member Christopher Go captured SN2026kid, a Type II supernova in NGC 5907, with his Celestron Origin.

04/25/2026

Its a day late, but April 24, 1990 was the day that NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope! PBS did an exciting piece on the day of the launch and we thought it well worth sharing again here!

17 likes. "From the archives: NASA launches Hubble Telescope in 1990"

04/11/2026

Just a day after the smooth success of the Artemis II mission concludes, we Dark Rangers remember the greatest survival story in modern history! On April 11, 1971, the Apollo 13 mission launched three astronauts to the moon: Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise.

Fifty-six hours into the mission, disaster struck during a routine oxygen tank stir. A damaged wire inside one of the tanks caused a short, and the tank exploded. Jack Swigert said, "Houston, we've had a problem here."

That calmly delivered radio communication drastically understated the issue, because the explosion crippled the spacecraft. Within minutes, power was lost, access to drinking water was gone, and the oxygen supply stopped. In just seconds, the mission goal went from heroically landing on the moon and returning to survival. The crew was forced to evacuate the "space ship" to the lunar module - the lander. There, with helpful communication with engineers and scientists of NASA, they stretched life support systems beyond what was thought possible. A vessel meant to sustain two men for two days was pushed beyond the limit to support three men for four days. They used a lot of duct tape.

The vessel carried these three around the moon on a parabolic arc that used lunar gravity to slingshot them back to Earth. However, they manually calculated with pencil and paper, a correctional rocket burn to ensure their aim was true. And the temporarily abandoned command module the "spaceship" name Odyssey, had one more vital function to perform. The astronauts needed to avoid a fiery death in Earth's atmospheric entry. The lunar lander with walls barely thicker than a beer can offered no protection. So after seeking refuge in the lander so as to not quite die from asphyxiation or dehydration they had to return to the explosion rendered unliveable Odyssey long enough to survive reentry. Once Odyssey was re-crewed the lunar module was detached and left to burn up in our atmosphere.

Spoiler Alert: The ablative heat shield for Earth reentry remained intact. This shield protected the crew from frictional heat and plasma (superheated atmosphere half as hot as the surface of the Sun itself). After entering the atmosphere at a bit less than 30,000 MPH, the plasma generated from crashing through the atmosphere caused radio silence for four minutes, an entire, agonizingly long, one minute longer than Ground Control anticipated. Dread built up in all waiting as seeming endless seconds passed... Until they heard the crackle of a radio transmission, "Parachutes deployed."

https://www.nasa.gov/history/nasas-apollo-13-mission-challenged-crew-launch-team/

04/01/2026

Pre-launch shows are usually even more boring than Super Bowl pregame shows, but this one for Artemis II is RIVETING!

Only 87 minutes to scheduled liftoff!

We're sending astronauts around the Moon for the first time in 50 years. Come watch with us.NASA's Artemis II mission is scheduled to lift off from Kennedy S...

03/24/2026

In 1993 today, astronomers Caroline and Eugyne Shoemaker, and David Levy, discovered an interesting comet! This comet, became known as Shoemaker-Levy 9 and yet it wasn't a single muddy ball of ice but had already broken into smaller (but still mountain-sized) pieces which continued to travel together like a train.

They theorized the comet was broken into smaller chunks by Jupiter's immense tidal forces in 1992; due to the "king planet's" intense gravitational pull. The comet appeared to them like a "string of pearls"

Comets being made of chunks of ice, frozen gasses and a mix of mineral debris are quite reflective. They have what is called a high albedo, a zero to 1.0 measurement of an object's shininess. Now days, thanks to more advanced telescopes, comets can be detected from as far away as Pluto.

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was significant because just a year later, 20 pieces of it were observed crashing into Jupiter's southern regions. The multiple impacts caused many great big explosive plumes equivalent to hundreds of millions of atomic bombs! The disturbed clouds could be seen from Earth bound telescopes for months afterwards.

Why this matters: This rare series of events showcases the potentially vital role that Jupiter plays in keeping the inner solar system safe (especially Earth) from devastating comet or asteroid impacts! The planet's massive gravitational pull has captured, or flung away many potentially hazardous objects during its 4.6 billion years of service.

03/20/2026

https://youtube.com/shorts/XOzZrIOA0Vc?si=VMA64oUGf6f0kQPP

Today is the equinox! Here's Doctor Becky on the difference between our equilux and equinox. Most shortform content is click bait, but Doctor Becky is really good at disseminating both forgotten basic astronomy and really complicated subjects like dark matter and black holes!

We did it we made it through the dark, cold winter and equinox is right around the corner. The day with equal daytime and nighttime, except that’s not quite ...

03/17/2026

Today, in 1926 marks the birth of modern rocketry. Before 1926 humanity was limited to tubes filled with gun powder. Our only method of rapid propulsion was to launch payloads placed on top of an explosive mix of potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal.

Yet 95 years ago today, a man by the name of Robert H. Goddard, physicist, engineer, and brilliant inventor changed the world. He successfully launched a 10 ft tall rocket approximately 40 feet in the air liquid oxygen mixed with gasoline as fuel. While the maximum height and launch speed (60 mph) of his rocket may seem very underwhelming now, it really set the tone for advancements in rockety for the modern era. His methodology and inventions led to astronauts safely landing on the moon and us being on the verge of returning to the lunar surface several decades later.

Here's a fun "Scientist Proven Right" story: Goddard published a research paper in 1920 claiming that with the smoothly controlled combustion of liquid propellant, that rockets will eventually reach the moon. An editorial from The New York Times ridiculed him, essentially said Goddard didn’t understand basic physics and suggested rockets wouldn’t work in space because there’s no air to push against.
The paper wrote that Goddard "seemed to lack the knowledge taught in high schools."

03/14/2026

Today marks the day that William Herschel discovered Uranus! He found the planet during a systematic night sky survey by accident; while using his homemade Dobsonian (2-mirror reflector) telescope to map the sky, he noticed a tiny turquoise disc. That fact Herschel recognized it as being more than single point of light was important. Even after the Extremely Large Telescope is completed in 2029, that soon to be, world-record telescope, with its 39m (130ft) diameter, won't be able to magnify a star. ALL stars, except our Sun, are too far way.

What's more, Herschel knew there was no such thing as a green-blue star, so after many nights of observing, watching it slowly moving against the motion of the background stars, he first thought it was a comet that was still too far away from our star to form a tail. But after even further observations, and with some strong encouragement from his colleague Johann Elert Bode, Herschel concluded that its movement was too regular and perfectly aligned with the ecliptic plane (Sun's equator extended into space). It could only be a planet, the first one confirmed with a telescope or added to human knowledge.

Fun fact: he originally wanted it named after King George III, calling it "Georgium Sidus" (George's Star). That turned out to be a good career choice because it earned him a 2 million dollar grant (value in today's US currency)! Herschel used the money to build a truly massive reflector that required a team of men to operate. Thankfully naming the planet for a British monarch didn't stick and the international astronomer community settled on Uranus (originally pronounced oo-ran-Oh-se) for that Latin Titan of the Sky.

03/10/2026

Today, in 1977 a pretty awesome accident occurred! A team of astronomers led by James L Eliot, were using the Kuiper Airborne Observatory (placed about 42,000 feet above Earth) to observe Uranus block the light of a distant star. The KAO Is a 747 jet with a powerful telescope on board, used to prevent earth's atmosphere from blocking sensitive space data collection. The goal was to get an accurate compositional reading of Uranus's atmosphere using the photons of that star passing through Uranus's gasses. (yes, with minimal extra effort that could be a fart joke 🤣)

What they also saw however, was the light of the star dim briefly several times 40 minutes before and after the actual star occultation! That means that the light of the star ran into something else orbiting around Uranus. That's right folks, they discovered a ring system! Can you imagine how much better off humanity would be if more people were as clever of observers as astronomers?! And although not entirely necessary extra validation, those same astronomers were proven correct 7 years later when Voyager 1 finally made its flyby of Uranus (or planet #7 as some cautious grade school teachers pronounce it).

post script: We Dark Rangers love that ice giant, and really enjoy letting our tours observe it through our BIG telescopes. Indeed, we don't hesitate to tell our own jokes about the "Turquoise World" so we can get past the giggling sooner, and then move on to teaching you something about Uranus that you always wanted to know but we're always too afraid to ask. Yep, we use that joke too! But this one: "No visit to the Dark Ranger Observatory is complete until you've had a good look at Uranus!" is our favorite and so we sell it printed on shirts and hoodies featuring the amazing artwork of the famous Tyler Nordgren (who said we could tag him in this way... as long as we don't do it a lot). 😎

03/08/2026

So around March 8 1979 Voyager 1 completed close flybies of Jupiter's moon, Io. (pronounced eye-oh in english) Photos the spacecraft beamed back to earth tell us a lot about the planetology of Io.

Voyager 1 actually managed to capture a volcanic eruption on Io! That makes it the first evidence of active volcanism outside of earth. With photo graphed plumes of lava launched up to 190 miles above the surface of the moon. In fact Io is the most volcanicly active object in the solar system. This is caused by tidal heating and flexing of the moon towards the immense gravitational pull of jupiter.

Io orbits jupiter at a distance of 262,000 miles, and it completes an orbit around jupiter every 1.77 earth days! The close orbital path of Io means that the tidally locked moon is constantly flexed towards the surface of jupiter, which produces a massive amount of heat in Io's rock