The Winter Solstice Hallelujah! Today marks the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. The shortening of daylight is finally over. For the next six months, our sunlight durations will only increase. Despite speaking of the solstice as a date, it is actually a moment. Precisely, the solstice is the moment one of our planet’s poles is […]
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The Great Conjunction If you’re a regular skywatcher you might already know the two biggest planets in our solar system – Jupiter and Saturn – have occupied the same portion of our cosmic ceiling for most of the year. In fact, in the preceding months, the two have crept closer and closer toward each
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Reindeer “Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen! – Clement Clarke Moore, “A Visit From St. Nicholas As we inch toward Christmas, one of the obvious nature connections to our modern celebrations is the reindeer. Oddly, though reindeer are ubiquitous to our knowledge of Santa and his yearly sleigh ride, in North America we don’t actually call these
Thundersnow The other day I watched Thunderball, the fourth James Bond film, which released in 1965 and stars the recently-departed Sean Connery as 007. In the film, Thunderball is a code name; sadly, the flick really has no elements of thunder (or, for that matter, balls). If you’re a fan of the series, youtube currently offers 22
2020: A Utah Odyssey Certainly one of the greatest science-fiction films of all time and one of the best films of any genre is Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 magnum opus, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Much of the credit, of course, goes to Arthur C. Clarke, the seminal writer whose short story The Sentinel inspired the film. Clarke co-wrote the
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Wild Turkeys O, peace! Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him: how he jets under his advanced plumes! – Shakespeare, Twelfth Night Here in the United States, we are on the precipice of Thanksgiving, which falls on the fourth Thursday of November. Traditionally, the protein of choice at feasts and banquets far and wide is
GLOFs & Jökulhlaups When I was just a wee nerd, one year at the Ohio State Fair I happened upon a merchant selling packs of playing cards called Magic: the Gathering. I had no idea what they were. My mother and sister, who were with me, had no idea what the game was. But they looked
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Frankenstein’s Monster Volcano Mary Shelley might not be the first name encountered when considering women in science and nature, but she led an extraordinary life and has an intriguing connection to one of the largest events in geologic history. Additionally, many literary critics dubbed one of her novels as the first science-fiction piece ever written. Her
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The Chelyabinsk Fireball This week the newsletter touched on a couple of important points in the study of meteorites. We started with a sharpshooting rock in Benld, Illinois, that left an interesting path to its final resting place in 1938. At the time it was the closest a human had been to a strike in recorded history.
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Sylacauga In the last issue, we traveled to the strangely-named Benld, Illinois, to investigate a close encounter with a meteorite. In 1938, some humans had the closest recorded brush with a meteorite impact. Just 50 feet away, a space rock hit a garage, went through the ceiling of a car, its cushion, its floorboard, bounced