Welcome to the Observatory's Front Page. Included here are some of the latest news and articles that may be of interest to our visitors.
FAU's Astronomical Observatory is housed under a four meter diameter dome on the Boca Raton campus of Florida Atlantic University. We welcome students, faculty, staff and members of the general public to join our scheduled observations or our public viewing events. Our telescope is mounted on a small platform, at the top of stairs, looking out of the roof of our building, over Boca Raton, to space and beyond!
Section updated: September 4 th, 2026.
Below is shown what our sky would be like by 9:00 pm on the 4th. The wondrous objects of our Galaxy will be fully in view for us to see them. The night sparkles with its multitude of interesting objects are shown below as the green, pink and blue circles in the image, though they are challenged by the light pollution from the surrounding cities.
In the western horizon, the bright planet Venus will appear less than 3° away from the star Spica, at Virgo the maiden’s left hip. It will be 0.524 au away from us and appear like a crescent Moon, in a waxing crescent phase. But as Venus comes our way in its orbit about the Sun, it appears to be getting thinner, so it really is a waning crescent for it. As we are 1 au away from the Sun, then you should be able to envision it near the right angle of a 44°-46°-90° triangle. I once showed a small boy the planet through a telescope in a similar phase years ago and he declared “It’s a moon!”
Know that it would be an impossible view according to ancient Ptolemy, who wrote the Almagest, had insisted that it orbited on an epicycle around a fixed midpoint between the Earth and the Sun. But Galileo argued that if Venus did so, then all we would ever see of it would be a thin lit section, like a crescent phase, as we would forever look at mostly its night side. So, in order for us to see Venus lit up by over half its surface like we will those nights, both Galileo and Copernicus argued that it must be coming toward us from the far side of the solar system as it orbits the Sun. So, viewing Venus early in the evening will give you a chance to personally eyewitness proof that the Earth is not at the center of the solar system!
If the sky is cooperative, there will also be globular clusters, such as NGC 5897 in Libra, M5 in Serpens Caput, M13 & M92 in Hercules, and M10, 12 & 14 in Ophiuchus, M4 in Scorpio and M22 in Sagittarius. M57, the Ring Nebula, in Lyra near the star Vega. In the constellation of Cygnus the swan, there will be its “blinking planetary nebula” NGC6826 and its apparent, binary star called Alberio, the swan’s beak, which are colored blue and gold, like the Ukrainian flag. And off in the east, we can finally see the planets Neptune and Saturn to appear to us by the evening’s end.
