Yep, I’m actually out watching the lunar eclipse progress – or at least, I was. The conditions are deteriorating and I’m both too cold and too tired to stay with it. This is as close as I’m likely to get to live-blogging, by the way. I know that’s disappointing my legions of followers who have been waiting for an update.
In my area, we’ve got thin overcast starting
So, a few months back I posted an image of the night sky (duplicated at left) that featured a portion of the constellation Scorpius, and made a remark about two sets of twin stars in the image. I’m only an astronomy buff, and never really bothered memorizing the constellations because I consider them
When I took a quick look outside tonight thinking I was hearing rain (it was actually the bubbles in my Pepsi can, but that’s another post,) the moon was peeking through a thin layer of high cirrus clouds and producing an effect much like the above image. However, the shots I took just now don’t look like the image above, because that one was taken under rather specific conditions.
Before
One of the best things about this is, we have grandstand seats to see this in person, every one of us, just by ducking out from under our roofs when the weather is clear. We are surrounded by something so stunning, so overwhelming, and all we have to do is be aware of it. There are no word games to play, no philosophy to explain it, no greater understanding to be sought. Just the knowledge
Tonight, the sky was exceptionally clear, especially for summer, and I trekked (well, drove) down to Jordan Lake to see what I could capture. Jordan Lake is about the only place in the area with largely unobstructed views and relatively dark skies, and that “relatively” is key – there are too many cities nearby pumping light up into the sky for really good night views.
Nevertheless,
In a series of posts earlier, I talked about the possibilities of extra-terrestrial life, and in Part Three, I mentioned our findings of planets around other stars, usually referred to as “exoplanets.” Now, in that post, I was a bit misleading in the progress we’ve made, and while not exactly
Yeah, I’m still at it – there are links where you can find Part One and Part Two of this extended essay to catch up or keep continuity. Meanwhile, I’ll keep going with the idea, which basically is, what are the chances of us contacting intelligent life elsewhere in the Galaxy? This time, I talk about long-distance life affairs.
This continues a rather long-winded essay on my part. In Part One, I talked about the idea of extra-terrestrial life from the standpoint of cosmology, the planetary conditions that might be needed to produce it. In that post, I went out on a speculative limb, always a dangerous thing from
I’m warning you ahead of time, this is going to be long, as evidenced by the “Part One” bit above, but hopefully it’ll be interesting as well. I’ll do my best.
One of the staple topics of all-night bull sessions, and not just in college dorm rooms, is the concept of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, or to keep it simpler, elsewhere merely in our own Milky Way
Twenty years ago today, the space shuttle Discovery carried a brand new telescope aloft into space, to be settled into orbit the following day. And this was a significant delay over plans – the Challenger accident had occurred only eight months before the tentative launch date of Hubble in October 1986, and set its schedule (as well as everything else) back several years.
The telescope was