This time of year, you’ll no doubt be seeing commentaries about the Star of Bethlehem, many of which will explain away the “star” as a conjunction of two planets, or as a comet, or even as a bolide (very bright meteor). Looking over my past writing, I realize I’ve been guilty of this in this […]
Astronomy
Posted inField Notes
Atlas and Pleione’s Kids: The Pleiades
I’ve written about the Pleiades star cluster before (“Orion and the Pleiades,” Jan. 12, 2023), in which I focused on the ancient Greek myth of the hunter Orion endlessly pursuing Mom, Dad and seven sisters across the night sky. Here, I’m going to focus on the stars themselves, and what makes them so interesting to […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Moons of Mars
In the first volume of his Mars trilogy Red Mars, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has the larger of Mars’ two moons, Phobos, destroyed after it had been weaponized. Which would be a tragedy IRL, since Phobos may well be a stepping stone to exploring the Red Planet. It could also give us information […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Flammarion Engraving
“That good anchorite, who boasted of having been as far as the end of the world, said likewise, that he had been obliged to stoop low, on account of the joining of the sky and earth in that distant region.” — Francois de la Mothe Le Vayer, 1662 The lovely engraving of a pilgrim — […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Cosmic Distances
Looking up and around during the day, it’s easy to understand why the ancients believed that we live under a great dome of sky. Extrapolating to the night sky with the stars apparently rotating overhead, the sixth century Greek philosopher Anaximenes may have been the first to imagine that we live under a vast, rotating […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Awesome Dumbbell Nebula
Charles Messier (1730-1817) was a French comet hunter. Today, scattered around the globe, hundreds of amateur astronomers follow his lead every night, each striving to be the first to discover a fuzzy, luminous patch that (a) turns out to be moving against the background stars, that is, a comet; and (b) is subsequently named after […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Multi-messenger Astronomy and Gold Rings
Astronomers glean information about distant objects from four types of energetic signals: electromagnetic radiation (such as visible light, radio waves and gamma waves); gravitational waves (subtle “ripples’ in spacetime, first detected in 2015); neutrinos (electrically neutral elementary particles having almost no mass); and cosmic rays (high energy particles, mostly protons, that, like neutrinos, travel at […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Orion and the Pleiades
Winter nights here on Humboldt’s coast often bring startlingly clear skies, complete with those bright winter constellations our ancestors knew, loved, feared and mythologized. Even from the streetlights of Old Town Eureka, with its confusing medley of ionized mercury and sodium vapors and plain vanilla white LEDs, you can still see Orion the Hunter chasing […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
North Coast Night Lights: Conjunction – Saturn Overtakes Jupiter
Racing around the sun like slot cars on an elliptical track, Earth was on an inside line and coming around fast. Jupiter and Saturn were in view ahead. Jupiter was taking a much wider line and Saturn was lazily rounding the bend still farther out. Earth would overtake them. Again. The race has been on […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
TMT: Astronomy’s New Eye
Say it quickly — “30-meter telescope” — and it doesn’t sound like much. But this new $2 billion instrument under construction near the summit of Mauna Kea on Hawai’i’s Big Island is a monster. Compare, for instance, the current record holder for optical telescopes, the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias (located on Spain’s Canary Islands) which […]
Posted inNews
North Coast Night Lights: This Way to the Galactic Core
I found myself on a ridge line along the Kneeland Road the night of July 18, 2018, on an impulsive late-night mission to the Galactic Core. It was out there, all I needed was a stretch of road that would take me up to meet it at the horizon. We live in the Milky Way […]
Posted inNews
Countdown to Partial Totality: Eclipse 2017
The countdown is on for Monday’s eclipse. While the moon will begin moving in front of the sun at 9:01 a.m. here on the North Coast, the event’s peak hits at 10:14 a.m. with 87 percent coverage, which will leave just a glowing crescent visible before the moon begins its slow retreat. Read previous Journal coverage […]