Conversation: Richard & the Pillars of Creation

ANN:  Richard Panek has just published a book called The Pillars of Creation.  It’s about the James Webb Space Telescope — which I call JWST and Richard calls Webb, and there’s a story behind that difference but it’s not relevant here — and how it got built and what it’s finding.  And Richard, this is […]

Eclipse

Eclipse The earth moved to follow his smile, but she stood aside, let the planet pass. Her signs were subtler: quivers of little stars, the sucking dark depths of the ocean. Young women turned their faces to him like flowers, hoping for a laugh, an accidental touch, and men labored hard to prove their worth […]

Star Party

One cold night a couple of weeks ago, my family and I bundled up to bike out to a park in one of Seattle’s northern suburbs. We have a routine for such trips after all these years. First we layer, and then we bedeck our bikes with lights: front lights, back lights, hub lights, even […]

Science Poem: To the Sylacauga Meteorite

NOTE: The images in this post are best viewed on a desktop device or tablet, not a phone. One dim November afternoon in Alabama in 1954, 34-year-old Ann Hodges curled up on her couch, pulled the quilts around her body, and fell asleep. She woke in pain and disorientation to a house full of smoke, […]

Happy Solstice! Look Up and Feel Your Place in the Universe

In this year of darkness, today brings something to celebrate. Winter solstice is the shortest day of the year, which means the light will finally start returning. And this year, the first day of winter also marks a special celestial event — the Jupiter-Saturn Great Conjunction. Imagine that our solar system is a racetrack, and […]

Guest Post: What It’s Like to Peer Through Hubble

For a brief period of my life, the Hubble Space Telescope would shoot me an email with a link about once every two weeks. Then I would click and wait. Then hundreds of thousands of stars would spill across my monitor, lighting up cells in my eyes with photons from a screen from a file […]

Auditing Astronomy Class

It’s my mom’s birthday today, so I thought I’d revisit this post about a time when she audited an astronomy class. This semester, she’s taking French. Bon anniversaire, maman. I’m not sure exactly where this story begins, but maybe it’s here: Sometime this summer, my mom decided to take an astronomy class. She had taken […]