The Sirens of Titan Join me on a trip toward the outer reaches of our solar system. On the voyage, we’ll mix metaphors from two fantastic authors. I think the conflation we’ll make might be acceptable to one of them. Maybe both! In 1959, Kurt Vonnegut published his second novel. Setting the tone for his
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Alien Aurorae In Episode 228 we learned the basics of an aurora, the gorgeous, ephemeral dance of the firmaments. Solar winds slam into Earth’s magnetosphere, a meeting that kicks off a process that excites atoms in our atmosphere, producing fluorescent displays in the sky. Those fortunate few who witness them are mesmerized and thrilled. But we earthlings
Aurora The Valkyrior [Valkyries] are warlike virgins, mounted upon horses and armed with helmets and spears. /…/ When they ride forth on their errand, their armour sheds a strange flickering light, which flashes up over the northern skies, making what Men call the “aurora borealis”, or “Northern Lights”. — Thomas Bulfinch, Mythology Sorry, Disney fans, we
The Sky Really Is Falling Chicken Little – originally known as Henny Penny – took a lot of flak for constantly touting the end of the world. If you watched the news over the preceding weekend and looked to the skies, you might be forgiven for giving Chicken Little a bit of a reprieve. Space
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The Unaccountable Freak & the Comet I think it’s fair to say no comet is as popular in the collective consciousness as Halley’s Comet. Every once in a while another will pop up, such as Hale-Bopp, which garnered a lot of attention in 1997 due to the cult called Heaven’s Gate, or last year’s spectacular NEOWISE.
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Uranus Stinks Way back in Issue 25 we discovered Uranus is tilted and you probably should have seen a doctor. Nearly a year later, it seems you let the problem fester and things are even worse. Now, you notice something foul coming from Uranus. A rank odor seems to emanate from Uranus. Uranus smells like rotten
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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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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