My boys and I have gone to the sun and back. Not literally, of course. We’ve been on the curve of the Earth the whole time. But we’ve been on a mission, 20 nights on the road traveling north toward the longest day of the year. Our trip started in Colorado near the 40th […]
Astronomy
Ok, I thought, I’m an astro writer, I got this. For one thing, you wouldn’t use astroseismology to look at the pulses of a pulsating white dwarf: pulses are relatively long, astroseismology looks for little jitters. For another, AG spelled it “asteroseismology,” laughably wrong. After further investigation, the astro writer learns a lesson: never second-guess […]
After several thousand years spent looking up and contemplating the nature of the cosmos, as well as what’s for dinner, we humans have amassed a lot of knowledge. We know the precise age of the Earth and the universe. We know how life sends copies of itself into the future. We know, with amazing accuracy, […]
Early on 20th March, professional theoretical cosmologist and amateur astrophotographer Peter Dunsby of the University of Cape Town was imaging a beautiful part of the sky, in the constellation of Sagittarius. When you look at this part of the sky, you’re staring toward the centre of the galaxy, and your view is filled with beautiful […]
Saturday, March 31, was kind of a big day for the moon. It was full for the second time this month, making it a blue moon — the second of 2018. It was also the first full moon after the spring equinox, what’s known as the Paschal moon. The first Sunday after such a moon […]
A neighborhood kid, maybe 10 years old, doesn’t have the usual relationship with gravity. I know it’s her even when I can’t see her clearly by the way she moves through space: even when she’s not running, just walking, she looks like she might re-connect with the earth but also she might not. She reminds […]
I have a friend who is a magician. He performs the occasional stage show with card tricks and coins hidden behind the ear. His work is sleight of hand, a flash of movement deceiving the eye. He’d say it’s science. You experiment and find what actually works. My friend, Angus Stocking, is also a tarot […]
Last week Michelle wrote that, given the speed of change in the reality under the science, climatology needed some new words, and she proposed a beauty: “antevernal,” meaning “daffodils blooming in February.” To back her word-making, she quoted a naturalist: “If the language we use to speak of the natural world is not innovative and […]