The cloudy weather lately has been bad news for Friday Night Star Parties but it has given us some time to reduce a back-log of pretty pictures the UIS Barber Observatory took over the summer. Below is an image of the Eagle Nebula (M16) in the constellation Serpens.

This open star cluster in the Milky Way is well known to amateur astronomers as a particularly rich and colorful cluster.  The colors reveal the temperatures of the stars, with blue stars being hotter and red stars being cooler.  Below is an image produced from a series of exposures taken by the 20-inch telescope at the UIS Barber Observatory on June 11, 2013.   This cluster contains about 2900 stars and has an estimated age of 220 million years (very young when we consider our own Sun is at least 4 billion years old).

The spiral galaxy to the left of center in this picture is NGC 4414.  It is about 62 million lightyears away from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices.  On June 8th astronomers in Italy noted a new bright star in the galaxy just to the left of the center in this image.  A spectrum obtained by the Keck II telescope in Hawaii two days later confirmed this was a star many times the mass of the Sun that had exploded as a supernova.

The University of Illinois Springfield Astronomy-Physics Program is co-hosting a viewing of the Perseid Meteor shower before dawn on Monday, August 12.  

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This is a composite image of the galaxy M33 in the constellation Triangulum.  It is a collection of 40 billion stars about 3 million light years away.  M33 is one of three large galaxies in our local group (including also the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milkway Galaxy).