I grant this is just straight-up astroporn but let’s try to make it legit. It’s a picture taken in 2009 by the Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 3372, the great nebula in the constellation Carina, which is in the sky over the southern hemisphere. “Nebula” is an old astronomical word that has referred to a […]
Ann
In 2007, the Galaxy Zooites — 100,000 housewives, high school students, helicopter pilots, physicians, school teachers, truck drivers, secretaries, and a mobile home park manager from all over the world – got together on the internet under the guidance of some astronomers and classified galaxies. Galaxies tend to be either spirals or ellipticals, computers are […]
Heat rises, cold falls, and like a pan of soup on a hot stove, the earth boils, exceedingly slowly. The boiling is called convection: columns of heat rise from the earth’s hot core, move up through the viscous solidity of the mantle, cool at the crust, roll over and fall back down. The crust that […]
Even though Heather is Canadian, Josie and I have prevailed and Last Word on Nothing is having a holiday today, the American Labor Day during which labor is celebrated but nobody works. We’ll be back on Tuesday and we hope that before then you won’t have gotten discouraged and quit. Please, come back. Actually Labor […]
Sublime: you don’t hear it much except as an adjective meaning really, really good, used the way “divine” or “glorious” “wonderful” are used, just another adjective, nothing to do with divinity or glory or wonder. But really, sublime describes something that takes you beyond the ordinary — Glenn Gould plays Bach sublimely — something […]
This is how astronomers think giant galaxies form super-massive black holes (the adjectives are the astronomers’). Way back at the beginning, maybe a billion years after the birth of a 14 billion year old universe, enormous galaxies a hundred times bigger than the Milky Way were born, pulling themselves together out of clouds of stars […]
The Perseids are reliable, regular shooting stars, a meteor shower that shows up nights in late July every year. I didn’t see the Perseids this year myself because Baltimore’s skies are a rich carnelian haze that hold nothing much and certainly not meteorites. And Heather didn’t see them because, she thinks, of light pollution. To […]
This is a photograph — meaning, it’s real — taken from 114 million miles away on the far side of the sun. The brightest little dot in the lower left is the earth. The less bright dot near it is our moon. Click on it: it almost makes you cry.
