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 […]
The Winter Solstice Read More »
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
The Great Conjunction Read More »
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.
The Chelyabinsk Fireball Read More »
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
The Benld Meteorite The scene: Benld, Illinois. The date: 29 September 1938. This story offered two strange things to my world. The larger anecdote we’ll get to in a bit, but let’s start with the second, smaller interesting point. How in the world do you pronounce Benld? What is a Benld? Who is or was
The Benld Meteorite Read More »
The Autumnal Equinox Pumpkin spice permeates the air. Color creeps into the leaves. A favorite season for many people begins tomorrow – autumn. With all the fun of fall, unfortunately, comes the notion that, indeed, winter is coming. Daylight is slipping away. For those of us who loathe the lack of daytime in the winters, the autumnal
The Autumnal Equinox Read More »
The Green Flash There was a rush for the surface and as eyes turned southward, they saw a tiny but brilliant green spot where the last ray of the upper rim of the sun hung on the skyline. It lasted an appreciable length of time, several seconds at least, and no sooner disappeared than
Comet NEOWISE The astrophotography world has been abuzz in recent weeks thanks to the spectacular emergence of Comet NEOWISE, which is one of the brightest visible objects in the northern hemisphere since the famous 1997 edition of Comet Hale-Bopp. Before March of this year, we didn’t even know this comet existed. Astronomers picked up an
The Summer Solstice Tuesday, 21 June, marks 2023’s summer solstice. The word solstice comes from the Latin solstitium, which combines sol (sun) and stit (stopped or stationary). Technically defined, the summer solstice is the point when one of Earth’s poles is tilted maximally toward the sun. Broadly defined, it is the day on which the sun reaches the highest position
The Summer Solstice Read More »
Skywalker and Depthdiver The Dr. Seuss book Oh, the Places You’ll Go! is a fairly common graduation gift and for some people it is prophetic. If the book, published in 1990, had been around in the 1960s you might have been a true Nostradamus had you given a copy to Kathryn Sullivan. A couple of weeks ago she
Skywalker and Depthdiver Read More »