Black Moon While the Sun is invariably the most important body in space, an argument could easily be made that humans care more about the Moon. The queen of the night sky, we’ve looked at our satellite with awe for millennia. The ability to look at the Moon might be why we give it more love than […]
The Longest Lightning Flash Of the naturally occurring phenomena, one of the most visceral is lightning. Few things can fill us with wonder and a sense of immense, dangerous power like a bolt from the sky. So, it’s no surprise that we’ve studied lightning during this project over the years. We’ve seen it show up
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Talking to Aliens With Wheat In 1784, a seven-year-old German child began elementary school. During a mathematics lesson, the child’s teacher asked the class to sum all the integers from 1 to 100. As the other students slogged through the calculations, the young Johann announced the answer to his instructor: 5,050. The teacher was astonished. How
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Lunistices Though the sky is filled with immeasurable objects – galaxies, stars, asteroids, Uranus – two of them dominate our perspectives: the Sun and the Moon. Most celestial bodies feature tangible but often imperceptible cycles, thanks to Earth’s rotation, but our star and our satellite grace us with significant patterns. Our definitions of time and
The Anatomy of a Lunar Eclipse One of the English language’s most sublime words is syzygy. A syzygy occurs when at least three celestial bodies align in a plane. Note: the following images are not to scale! When we think of syzygies, we often think of the Earth, Sun, and Moon, but any three bodies could
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Schrödinger’s Grand Canyons of the Moon Erwin Schrödinger is best known to the modern layperson for his eponymous, feline thought experiment. Schrödinger’s cat was designed during a conversation he had with Albert Einstein, about potential paradoxes that arise with certain interpretations of quantum mechanics. Inside a box is a kitty, a vial of poison, a radioactive
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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
