The First Untethered Spacewalk On 20 February 1984, astronaut Hoot Gibson peered out of Challenger at something rare and sensational. He grabbed a camera, took a light meter reading three times, checked the focus four times, and snapped one of the starkest, most indelible images in the history of photography.Bruce McCandless II floated 300 feet away, blanketed […]
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Uranus Is Cold Really cold. You should probably get that checked out. The amount of light a body receives plummets exponentially as the distance to a star increases (the formula is 1/distance squared). Uranus is just over 19 astronomical units away from the Sun, meaning it gets 0.27% of the sunlight we receive on Earth
Parade of Planets Gazing into the night sky can impart a viewer with a sobering sense of perspective. The billions of stars out there. The millions of years the light took to travel from distant galaxies. It’s easy to be overwhelmed with a feeling of unimportance, as if we’re a speck of sand on a
The Carrington Event It was a sight never to be forgotten, and was considered at the time to be the greatest aurora recorded […]. The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes, recognising, the divine immanence, immutable law, cause, and effect. The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings, and thought it
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Sunspots, Solar Flares, & CMEs In Part I of this series, we discovered the Sun emits more than just visible light. The outermost portion of the Sun – the corona – becomes so hot that particles gather enough kinetic energy to escape the star’s gravity. As these masses flee the Sun, they become the solar wind, moving
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Sunlight & Solar Wind Stars are the gnarly dynamos of the largely empty universe. Packed with nuclear reactors at their cores, these bodies make life possible. The number of factors that allow Earth to teem with life is high enough to make one believe in serendipity. We owe everything to our star – the Sun
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The Great North American Eclipse Preview Perhaps the most anticipated natural or scientific event to occur since the advent of this project will cast shadows on Earth on 8 April 2024. Dubbed the Great North American Eclipse by many, on the afternoon of the second Monday in April, the moon will move between the sun and the
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Eclipse Glasses In North America, we’re on the precipice of a total solar eclipse. On 8 April 2024, a swath of the continent, from Mexico, through the heart of the United States, and a small part of Canada, will experience one of the natural world’s great expositions. In some places, for up to four minutes,
Hubble Tension Our current cosmological history begins with the Big Bang. The model suggests that if one could go back far enough in time, the discernible universe would be packed into a highly dense and hot quantum, which then exploded into the dynamo reality we experience today. First proposed by Catholic priest and physicist Georges Lemaître,
Odysseus Few literary characters rise to a level of timelessness in which their stories survive millennia. Still, fewer characters see their names become eponyms folded into multiple languages. One such gargantuan of the page is Homer’s Odysseus. If you’re into the Romans or the Irish, you might know him better as Ulysses. Though the champion