America’s current plans for human space exploration seem horribly slow, considering we won’t leave Earth’s orbit until 2025 and won’t reach Mars until 2035. Worse than that, solar radiation spikes could keep us grounded for decades more. Continue reading
This nebula known technically as NGC 6960 but nicknamed the “Witch’s Broom Nebula” is an expanding cloud of debris that gains its colors by sweeping up and exciting existing nearby gas. The nebula was created by a supernova explosion about … Continue reading
This week the Moon will be a thin crescent, so it will be a much better week for stargazing. Here are the astronomical events worth seeing this week: November 1, 2010: November evenings are excellent times to watch the Milky … Continue reading
By now you may have heard the report that as many as 1/4 of all the sun-like stars in the Milky Way may have Earth-like worlds. Briefly, astronomers studied 166 stars within 80 light years of Earth, and did a survey of the planets they found orbiting them. Continue reading
This is a fairly old picture of the Sun since it has been taken on September 14, 1997 by the space-based SOHO observatory. It represents a massive solar eruption. Such a phenomenon occurs when magnetic fields arching from the solar … Continue reading
This week stargazing calendar lacks the excitement of last week (a comet and a meteor shower), but there are still a few events worth seeing: October 26, 2010: The star Aldebaran, the orange “eye” of the Taurus constellation will line … Continue reading
The Director of NASA’s Ames Center, Pete Worden has announced an initiative to move space flight to the next level. This plan, dubbed the “Hundred Year Starship,” has received $100,000 from NASA and $1 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Continue reading
Mercury looks so much like our Moon, doesn’t it? 🙂 This photo of the unusual Rembrandt impact basin was taken by the robotic MESSENGER spacecraft in 2008. The Rembrandt impact basin spans over 700 kilometers and is 4 billion years … Continue reading
This is a short calendar of this week’s major astronomical events you should witness: October 19, 2010: Jupiter will be positioned below the Moon and will remain there throughout the night. The giant planet will appear like a brilliant star. … Continue reading
This picture of cloudy Venus wast taken by the Galileo spacecraft. Venus is very similar to Earth in size and mass, so it is sometimes referred to as Earth’s sister or twin planet, but the resemblance ends there. Venus is … Continue reading
