Let’s discover the beauty of the cosmos

Activities

Outdoor :
Enjoy the absence of light pollution and the clear nights in the Petit Buëch valley to live a sensorial experience in connection with the cosmos.

Exploration of the sky / Initation to observation
These two activities are generally processed together in an activity.

Indoor : 
Les pieds sur Terre, le regard vers les étoiles... et au-delà !

• Educational workshop
  
• Conferences 

right now on planet Earth...

January 3, a busy day for the planet Earth and in its sky :
- at 11:03, the Moon begins 2026 as it finished 2025, in Super Moon. It will still be quite round when it rises at the very beginning of night.
The term Super Moon is used when it is closest to the Earth in its orbit. The distance from the Earth to the Moon varies between 356,410 km at perigee and 405,500 km at apogee : on January 3 at 11:03 AM, the Moon is 368,037 km from Earth, 10,000 km further than the Super Moon of December 5, 2025.
- At 17:16, the Earth is at the perihelion of its rotation around the sun, which is the closest point to the Sun in its orbit, at 147,098,74 km (0.98 AU – astronomical unit). Indeed, its orbit describes an ellipse, not a circle, around the sun.
This is the time of year when the orbital speed of the Earth around the Sun is the greatest : 30,287 km/s (109 033 km/h). 
The solar energy received by the Earth at perihelion is about 6% more than that received at aphelion (the most distant point from the Sun on the orbit).

On January 10th at 9:34, Jupiter is in opposition : the Sun, Earth and Jupiter are aligned. 

Jupiter is opposite of the sun in the terrestrial sky. It shines all night (with a magnitude of -2.7) in the constellation Gemini, just below Castor and Pollux.
The shortest distance between Earth and Jupiter (for this opposition) occurs the day before, on January 9, with 633 million kilometers, which is a little more than 4 times the distance from Earth to the Sun.