View the Summer Night Sky with Help from CALS and NPR

Did you know the Central Arkansas Library System and the Central Arkansas Astronomical Society have partnered to make fourteen telescopes available for lending to CALS cardholders? The telescopes are 4.5″ Orion StarBlast Newtonian instruments that gather several hundred times more light than the unaided eye and magnify up to 56 times. They are particularly suited to observing the moon and the brighter planets, such as Saturn and Jupiter, and, under proper conditions, “deep sky” objects, such as star clusters.  For more information about the program, click here »

And, thanks to the team behind Skunk Bear, NPR’s science youtube channel, you can get a brief introduction to the constellations on view right now in the summer sky (video best watched on the Chrome browser):