The little town of Tekapo, New Zealand (pop. 830) is fighting to preserve the night sky.
In 1965, officials of this pristine lakeside town recognized the importance of protecting the skies around the nearby Mount John Observatory and began putting controls on outdoor illumination.  According to an AP report, the ordinances require that, “low-energy sodium lamps [...]

Research presented recently at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Long Beach, California suggests that our Milky Way Galaxy is considerably larger than originally believed. Astronomers used the VLBA (Very Long Baseline Array) to map our home galaxy in high detail. The results suggest that the Milky Way is comparable in size to [...]

A team of astronomers has discovered a closely-packed group of about 100,000 stars 30,000 light years away in the inner parts of our galaxy. This previously unknown cluster, that detected using the European Southern Observatory’s New Technology Telescope at La Silla, Chile, is about seven light years wide but contains approximately 100,000 stars for a [...]