You don’t need to be a nautical navigator to know what you’re looking at in the night’s sky. Although, looking at the North Star aka Polaris can be helpful according to every survival movie I have ever seen. While many folks can readily recognize constellations like The Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, and the Southern Cross, there’s …
You may have already noticed a very bright planet looking East in the early night’s sky. This is our solar system’s largest planet Jupiter, and not only is it in opposition (meaning it is on the opposite side of Earth from the Sun), but it is also the closest it has been to Earth since …
UPDATE: Launch is now scheduled for November 15 at 10:04pm PT. After many delays, NASA’s massive new Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and uncrewed Orion spacecraft is set to blast off on a 42-day mission to orbit the Moon and back again. The Artemis 1 mission is seeking to test the new spacecraft to ensure …
James Webb Space Telescope is finally active and bringing back unprecedented images from the edge of the universe and the beginning of time! You may have seen one of its first images that shows a universe chockablock full of galaxies – and that’s only a fraction of what’s out there. In fact, this was said …
Seven planets are now aligning in the night sky in a rare conjunction event; Mercury, Venus, Uranus, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, and the Moon, which hasn’t occurred since 2004 and won’t happen again until 2040. And, they are visible in the order they are from the Sun! The five brightest planets – Mercury, Venus, Mars, …
Blessed be the sci-fi fruit. Check out two new shows that are truly out-of-this-world, and two rooted right here on terra firma. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Man, this new Star Trek is so much fun. I have to say, I enjoyed last week’s episode more than Obi-Wan Kenobi. Strange New Worlds harkens back to …
The brilliant Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team has achieved brilliance again, bringing us the first image of the black hole at the center of our very own Milky Way galaxy – Sagittarius A*. While much closer to Earth, being that it is in our own galaxy some 27,000 light years away, this black hole was …
The James Webb Telescope’s instruments are now fully aligned and focused! And, according to NASA, the “optical performance of the telescope continues to be better than the engineering team’s most optimistic predictions.” After nearly 25 years of development and a million mile do-or-die unfolding process in space this is music to my ears. To check …
The Expanse has been such a wonderful watch the past six years. It’s a rare sci-fi show that actually integrates a lot of real science and physics into its narrative – like having ship’s thrusters fire “backwards” to slow down in space. More than that, though, it has had some of the most compelling female …
Lunatics unite! On May 26, 2021 there will be a Supermoon coinciding with a total lunar eclipse – called a Super Blood Moon. But, you’ll have to be up early, and on the West Coast, to view all stages of the eclipse. The lunar eclipse will begin at 1:47am PT, with the Moon being partially …