It’s a bird... It’s a plane... It’s Suuuppperman. Wait...no, it’s a squirrel! A flying squirrel?! There are 4 species of squirrel that live in Ohio: the fox squirrel, Eastern gray squirrel, American red squirrel, and Southern flying squirrel. The flying squirrel is the most common and abundant, though is the most rarely seen due to it being entirely nocturnal and living high in the tree canopy. Flying squirrels do not actually fly, but glide from great heights with the help of a membrane called a patagium. They get a running start along a branch or will propel themselves from a stationary position, then as they are airborne will spread their limbs out into the shape of an X, extending the patagium. They are graceful while gliding and are able to maneuver with great accuracy. Southern flying squirrels are very social and will forage and “fly” together in large groups. They will also den together in the winter, partially for warmth in numbers. They make their nests deep in natural tree cavities and woodpecker holes, and also occasionally build nests from twigs and leaves. Their diet consists of nuts, fruit, fungi, insects, bird eggs, and flowers. They will also visit bird feeders for seeds at night. A trail camera focused on a bird feeder is a great way to monitor flying squirrel activity in your own yard. The flying squirrel is just one of many interesting nocturnal characters visitors can meet at our upcoming Enchanted Forest event. Learn even more about these adorable yet elusive creatures, and if you listen closely you may even get to hear the flying squirrel rap! Written by Michelle Leighty, TWC Environmental Education Specialist
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched on August 30, 2026, at 07:26AM EDT on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Roman isn’t orbiting Earth. Instead, it’s heading for the second Sun-Earth Lagrange Point, or L2 for short, a gravitationally stable region of space about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. The James Webb Space Telescope is also stationed at L2. Roman’s in-flight mission objectives are being checked off. So far, the telescope’s antenna and visor-like sunshade have been successfully deployed, and the Coronagraph Instrument has been successfully activated and has begun its monthslong series of calibrations and tests. The telescope is named after the late Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer and one of the architects of the agency’s modern science program. It is the first space telescope named for a woman. Dr. Roman championed space-based observatories that could study the universe from above Earth’s hazy atmosphere while making their data broadly available to the scientific community. NASA has planned a five-year mission for Roman with the option of adding another five-year mission after that. The telescope has a multipurpose mission. The Roman Space telescope has been uniquely designed to study and solve two of the biggest questions, biggest mysteries, in physics and astronomy, what is dark matter, the stuff holding galaxies together, and what is dark energy, the invisible force making the universe expand faster and faster over time. 95 percent of the universe is made of stuff we don’t understand at all and can’t see directly. Understanding this 95% will allow us to understand how the universe evolved into what we see today and what its ultimate fate could be. The telescope will also be hunting for exoplanets and rogue planets and testing a new coronograph, which if successful, will image Jupiter-sized planets close to their host stars for the first time ever. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be pumping out data. NASA Senior Project Scientist, Dr. Julie McEnery, has said “To put this in context, one month of Roman observations would correspond to a century with Hubble.” Roman’s primary mirror began its journey sitting in storage as a piece of spare hardware for a scrapped US spy satellite. The 2.4m (96 inch) wide mirror was gifted free to NASA for use in the Roman telescope. This mirror is the same size and has the same resolution as the mirror in the Hubble Space Telescope. The real difference between Hubble and Roman is Roman’s camera, the Wide Field Instrument (WFI). This camera is amazing. It’s a 300mp camera built for visible and near infrared light. It has 18 individual image sensors. Each sensor is about the size of a saltine cracker that combines into one image. There is a gap between the sensors; to compensate for this gap NASA is using an imaging technique called dithering to rotate the telescope slightly so that the image overlaps and fills in the gaps. This camera can capture an area 100 times larger than Hubble’s field of view in a single image. Roman is going to take huge, gigantic images. Images stitched together for just one of Roman’s surveys displayed at full resolution on a 4K TV would require 500,000 TVs to display the full survey. That many TVs would cover the entire face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. It will take about 3 months of traveling, testing, and calibrating its instruments before observations can begin. NASA expects to release the first images from the Roman Space Telescope possibly as early as late December 2026 or January 2027. All the data Roman collects will be publicly available. Images will be available to anyone with an internet connection. The Roman Space telescope is going to survey billions of stars and galaxies and show us things we’ve never seen before. It might even surprise us and answer questions we haven’t even thought to ask. Actually, Roman’s mission isn’t far from what its primary mirror was built for. It will be spying for secrets – secrets of the universe. Dr. Roman would be proud. Written by Robin Gill, TWC Astronomy Education Specialist
