Website is Back Online

Tuesday, July 25th, 2017 10:46am EDT

Data corruption brought down the website today. The issue has been resolved and the website is back online. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Windows 10 Updates Causing Weather Server Outages

Tuesday, May 16th, 2017 12:22pm EDT

With the latest round of malware circulating the globe, there has been an increase in Windows 10 updates at odd hours. This results in a reboot that takes the weather station offline until it is manually restarted. We apologize for any recent outages and we are looking into ways to prevent this, or limit these interruptions. These outages only affect local weather and observatory generated radar images. The weather forecasts remain up to date, and there is an external link to the Bedford weather radar in the menu.

KBOX Local Radar is Down for Maintenance April 18th

Tuesday, April 18th, 2017 4:02pm EDT

The local KBOX radar for our area is down for maintenance Tuesday April 18 2017. From their web status page, they estimate the radar to be back online by 8pm. check out their status page for the latest updates.
http://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=NWS&issuedby=box&product=FTM

SAS Presents “The Milky Way A Galaxy of Stars” by Charlie Conrov

Tuesday, April 18th, 2017 9:52am EDT

The Skylight Astronomical Society, Inc of Stow will host a talk on April 30th before their monthly meeting. Charlie Conrov, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University and a senior member of the institute for Theory and Computation at the Center for Astrophysics, will talk about the types of stars in the Milky Way, stellar evolution, and how we measure distances to stars, and more. The talk will begin at 7:00pm before the clubs monthly meeting. The public is welcome and the talk is free.

Sean Walker Presented a Talk on “The Genesis of an Amateur Survey”

Tuesday, April 18th, 2017 9:43am EDT

Sean Walker, Equipment Editor for Sky and Telescope presented a talk at the March 30th meeting of The Skylight Astronomical Society, Inc. His talk was on his participation in the hydrogen-alpha all-sky survey he has undertaken with Dennis di Cicco and David Mittleman. His presentation was well received.

Skylight Astronomical Society, Inc. To hold it’s Monthly Meeting Feb 23rd

Tuesday, February 21st, 2017 12:22pm EST

The Skylight Astronomical Society, Inc will hold it’s February monthly meeting This Thursday February 23rd at the Observatory. The meeting begins at 7:30pm and is open to the public. There is no speaker planned for this meeting. Speakers have been scheduled for the March and April meetings.

Weather and Radar updates Were Interrupted by Failed Update

Friday, February 17th, 2017 4:20pm EST

A failed automatic virus software update earlier this week, caused an interruption of weather data and radar images to the observatory website. The issue has been resolved with a newer software update that was available on the virus software company’s website. No data was lost at the observatory. Sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused.

During this time period, weather forecasts and the external link to the local radar were up to date and functional.

A Green Comet Visits This Week

Tuesday, February 7th, 2017 9:54pm EST

Comet 45P/Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova will be passing by us this weekend. It will be visible in the early morning sky, Thursday through Sunday, high in the east moving through Hercules. This comet will be easily visible through binoculars or a small telescope. The comet’s bluish-green color comes from the vaporizing of diatomic carbon. Visit Seeker.com for the full article

Observatory Log is Back Online

Tuesday, February 7th, 2017 9:40pm EST

Last Year we had to retire our old website because the software company stopped support of the product and sections slowly began to malfunction. We switched to our new site but we do not have all of the functionality of the old site. One of the features of the old site was the observatory log which contained everything that was happening at the observatory. This included equipment status, activities, events and more. After much consideration, we decided to bring back the log using a modified wordpress theme.
We have archived the old log and will decide at another time if we will make it available online.