Observatory

Driving through Deer Creek Valley in mountainous eastern West Virginia, I came upon an amazing sight. A charming red barn with a silo stood in the foreground and a green alpine meadow spread out around it in all directions. Nothing unusual about that. But what was that huge, futuristic structure in the background towering above the tree line? I soon discovered that the titanic form looming on the horizon near the tiny farming community of Green Bank was the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world.

Seven-year-old Philip Citerone of Towson climbed onto a stepladder at the Maryland Space Grant Observatory in Baltimore last night to get a telescopic look at Comet Hyakutake, the first naked-eye comet that most Marylanders have ever seen.He pronounced it, "Boring.""All I see is a dot. Nothing is happening," the Cromwell Elementary School student said as he peered through the observatory's 20-inch reflector telescope, on the roof of the Bloomberg Physics and Astronomy Building at the Johns Hopkins University.

People often ask me: `Do you believe in the big bang or in creation by God?' And my answer is, `Yes.'" THE REV. BILL STOEGER, one of the astronomers who works at an observatory owned by the Vatican in the mountains of Arizona.

Do you see what I see? A star? Yes, in a manner of speaking: a partial eclipse of the sun. And not just any partial eclipse. This will be the first to occur on Christmas Day in nearly half a century. To mark the occasion, the Maryland Science Center will open its observatory doors (just the observatory, not the entire museum) on Christmas Day to any who are curious and who wish to observe safely this celestial phenomenon. And in the spirit of Christmas, the Science Center isn't charging admission but instead asks that visitors bring a non-perishable food or clothing items to be donated to Baltimore's St. Michael's Community Outreach Center.

With winter setting in, you might want to look up. Way up. Colder temperatures reduce the amount of water particles in the air, which makes the nighttime sky more clear. Better visibility paired with an early setting sun make the colder months prime for stargazing. Here are a few places that regularly offer up-close looks at distant stars and planets. All of these events are free and weather permitting. Anne Arundel Community College holds Community Observing Night the second Saturday of each month.

Mike Shriver writes from Linthicum: "I was wondering if you could point me to a Web site where I could find the sunrise and sunset times for each day of the year -- for the Baltimore area." I can. It's a U.S. Naval Observatory site: http:--aa.usno. navy.mil/data. Click on the second link. You can choose sunrise and sunset, or moonrise and moonset times, for any place in the United States or around the world. The location matters because the times vary with longitude and latitude.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Two astronauts of the shuttle Atlantis zipped around the spacecraft's bay for the second day in a row yesterday, testing possible equipment and techniques for construction of an orbiting space station later this decade.It looked more like play than work during the six-hour spacewalk. Taking turns, the astronauts glided back and forth on a cart running on a monorail along one side of the shuttle's 60-foot-long cargo bay.They were trying out different manual, mechanical and electrical prototype systems for scooting about safely and efficiently in weightlessness.

They came, they squinted, they saw. Night after starry night this week, earthlings entered the bunker of telescopes at the University of Maryland's observatory and gawked at the effects of the comet-bashing of Jupiter.The observatory, usually a quiet outpost stashed off Metzerott Road in College Park, was downright popular this week. Hundreds of people filled its Open House to hear textbook lectures and stand in line at the $50,000, 20-inch telescope aimed at that news-making white dot to the southwest.

In an era when scientists are lofting their best telescopes into space or building them on remote mountaintops in Chile or Hawaii, the bright lights and humidity of suburban Baltimore would seem the last place to spend $450,000 on a big research telescope. Yet that's precisely where the University of Maryland, Baltimore County has built its new, 32-inch Cassegrain reflector telescope - one of the largest optical telescopes east of the Mississippi. The Catonsville school has high hopes the new observatory will allow faculty members to produce publishable research, and help undergraduate students hone their observing skills.

In a gambit calculated to add eight months to the life of the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists this week shut down one of the telescope's gyroscopes. Hubble has been operating since Monday morning on just two gyros, something its designers never imagined. But by idling the third gyro and holding it in reserve, engineers and astronomers hope to buy more time for shuttle astronauts to reach the observatory with new gyros, fresh batteries and new scientific instruments. "We actually tested it in orbit, and it worked far better than any of us expected," said Preston M. Burch, Hubble program manager at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt.