This dramatic telephoto view across the Black Sea on June 6 finds Venus rising with the Sun, the planet in silhouette against a ruddy and ragged solar disk. Of course, the reddened light is due to scattering in planet Earth’s atmosphere and the rare transit of Venus didn’t influence the strangely shaped and distorted Sun. […]
THE obituaries and the laments are pouring in from around the world, and properly so, for author Ray Bradbury, dead this week at 91 – Bradbury was a writer for the whole world, not just for any one part of it. … He loved to talk. He loved his fans. He loved the adulation. And […]
We’re not supposed to look directly at the sun and surprisingly, the Hubble space telescope can’t either. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland manages the telescope. An exciting event is about to occur: “the transit of Venus,” […]
Will our Milky Way Galaxy collide one day with its larger neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy? Most likely, yes. Careful plotting of slight displacements of M31’s stars relative to background galaxies on recent Hubble Space Telescope images indicate that the center of M31 could be on a direct collision course with the center of our home […]
Life outside the cubicle . . .Simply amazing! Click here. Then click on ‘Start’. Move the toggle button to the left or right…
Emerging from the original “Men in Black” movie, in 1997, I thought that perhaps half the people in Times Square were aliens. And the Upper West Side was obviously full of aliens, too. Those people on Broadway, concentrating so hard that they seemed to be far, far away somewhere? Aliens. The central joke in “Men […]
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The privately bankrolled Dragon capsule arrived at the International Space Station for a historic docking Friday, captured by astronauts wielding a giant robot arm. … U.S. astronaut Donald Pettit used the space station’s 58-foot robot arm to snare the gleaming white Dragon after a few hours of extra checks and maneuvers. […]
When “Men in Black 3” opens everywhere over Memorial Day weekend, most moviegoers will just be hoping this sequel matches the original for popcorn-munching fun. But there are many people who say they’ve been victimized by and live in fear of real MIBs. And those stories, told for decades, are just as terrifying as they […]
Right now, the roughly 20,000 man-made objects orbiting the Earth are less regulated than the cars on a morning commute. Satellites are usually on a fixed path, so the traffic control comes prelaunch. … The International Telecom Union, a United Nations agency, assigns satellites slots in a geosynchronous orbit 22,000 miles above Earth. Operators must […]
A mere 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda Galaxy really is just next door as large galaxies go. So close, and spanning some 260,000 light-years, it took 11 different image fields from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite’s telescope to produce this gorgeous portrait of the spiral galaxy in ultraviolet light. While its spiral arms […]
