Construction Update
Four bids for construction of Kanab’s new Stellar Vista Observatory Phase 1 have been received and a local contractor with the winning bid has been selected. A formal “page turn” meeting to carefully review the final construction drawings was held on July 15 at the Kane County Water Conservancy District Office with members of the SVO Construction Committee, Water Conservancy, Mesa Design Architects, and the contractor present. Work will commence in coming weeks at the site following legal review and signing of a contract.
Event Round Up
SVO’s Curious Cosmos Lecture took place on July 15th Kanab City Library, with 12 people in attendance. Natalie Brannon discussed light pollution and how following basic principles with your outdoor lighting can help preserve your view of the dark starry skies over Kane County.
Our next Curious Cosmos Lecture will take place this fall. What topics would you like to hear about? Please reach out at: info@stellarvistaobservatory.
SVO’s free public star party took place on Friday, July 17th at Kanab Center. Although the skies were cloudy, 25 people attended with about 2/3 being kids. Fortunately, the crescent moon and Venus made an appearance for this multi-cultural crowd. In attendance were families from Lithuania, India, Texas, and Fredonia!
Comet 10P/Tempel 2
by Michael McKeon
Comet 10P/Tempel 2 is a periodic comet that orbits the Sun once every 5.4 years, and is currently making its appearance, although it is still 40 million miles away. It is currently visible with binoculars or telescopes toward the constellation Capricornus. Comet 10P/Tempel 2 will reach a perihelion on August 2 and make its closest approach to Earth on August 3.
The rocky ice core of the comet is about 6.5 miles across and the expanding gas and dust cloud, called the coma, is approximately 267,000 miles across. Unlike a comet dust tail, which tends to temporarily fan out in a direction away from the Sun, Comet 10P/Tempel 2 has a dust TRAIL made from the residual dust shed during its many ancient periodic orbits.
The image below was captured on July 20th and contains 51 good 10-second exposures over 10 minutes.
Photo of the Month
This month’s featured photo was taken by Nieko Randazzo of Amangiri.
This image was taken on July 9, 2026 in southern Utah. It features a breathtaking panorama of the milky way. The photo was taken with an Apple iPhone 17 Pro and touched up in Adobe Light Room, proving once again that you can take incredible photos with your phone.
If you have a great star or night sky photo that you would like to share with our audience, we would love to include it in our monthly newsletter. Please send your photos to info@stellarvistaobservatory along with your name and the names of key objects in the photo.
How “Standard Candles” Opened the Universe
by Ella Elman, SVO
The universe is vast. In fact, it is too vast for the human brain to comprehend. We can grasp a number such as a million or billion or even trillion, but beyond that, numbers seem meaningless. Here’s an example: Let’s say that there are approximately 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, with each having an average of 100 billion stars and one planet per star. That would total 200 sextillion planets (2 followed by 23 zeros). Honestly, my brain can’t make sense of a number that big.
Distances in space are even more vast and are measured in light-years. A light-year is 9460730472580.8 km, which is approximately 9.46 trillion kilometers or 5.88 trillion miles. With distances so great, how do scientists on earth figure out how far a star really is?
Imagine trying to understand a city at night by looking at its lights from miles away. Some lights are bright because they’re close; others are bright because they’re powerful. Without knowing which is which, you can’t tell how far away anything is.
Astronomers faced the same problem with stars. They needed a “standard candle”, which is an object whose true brightness is known. If you know how bright something really is, and you measure how bright it appears, you can calculate its distance. It’s the cosmic equivalent of recognizing a 60‑watt bulb across a field.
But where could such a candle be found? The answer was discovered by Henrietta Leavitt, who worked at the Harvard College Observatory in the early 1900s. Henrietta was part of a group of women known as “computers,” hired to analyze photographic plates of stars. Her assignment was to study variable stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy visible from the Southern Hemisphere.
These stars, called Cepheid variables, rhythmically brighten and dim over days or weeks. Henrietta noticed something extraordinary: The longer a Cepheid’s cycle, the brighter the star truly is. This is now known as Leavitt’s Law or the period–luminosity relationship. Because all the Cepheids in the Small Magellanic Cloud are roughly the same distance from Earth, differences in their apparent brightness must reflect differences in their actual brightness.
Once astronomers calibrated the relationship using nearby Cepheids, they suddenly had a cosmic measuring stick that reached millions of light‑years. Henrietta’s discovery became the first reliable standard candle, which opened the door to modern cosmology.
A few years after her death, Edwin Hubble used Cepheids to measure the distance to the Andromeda “nebula.” The result was shocking. Andromeda wasn’t a cloud inside our Milky Way. It was actually a galaxy, far beyond. This settled astronomy’s long‑running debate about the size of the universe and launched the realization that galaxies are moving away from each other, leading to the discovery of the expanding universe.
None of it would have been possible without Henrietta’s careful work. Henrietta never held a formal title and rarely received public recognition during her lifetime. Yet her insight remains one of the most important in astronomy. Every time scientists measure the distance to a galaxy, map the structure of the universe, or study cosmic expansion, they are using the tool she built.
If you are interested in learning more about human computers and the women of the Harvard Observatory, I highly recommend reading The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel.
Free Public Star Parties and Events
Please join us for free star parties and events this summer!
- Wednesday, August 12, 2026 – Jackson Flat Reservoir Boat Launch Parking Area. 9:15 pm. The Perseid meteor shower peaks tonight! It’s a new moon so viewing conditions should be excellent.
- Thursday, August 27, 2026 – Jackson Flat Reservoir Boat Launch Parking Area. 8:30 pm. A 96% lunar eclipse – see the Moon turn red! Eclipse begins at 8:30pm and reaches the peak at 10:10pm.
- Saturday, September 19, 2026 – Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. 8:30pm. International Observe the Moon Night. Events at Coral Pink carry a fee of $5/vehicle.
Our events calendar can be seen at: Public Star Parties | Stellar Vista Observatory.