We Are StarStuff
Full Moon taken from Madison, Alabama on October 22, 2010. Credit: Gregory H. Revera (Wikimedia Commons) For millennia, Full Moons have wielded a magnetic charm. This monthly event has been the inspiration behind myths, tales, traditions, and even farming....
While many of us were celebrating the end of 2023 and the coming of 2024, the Sun was having its own celebration blasting an X5.0 flare from sunspot region 3536. Records show this to be the most powerful flare seen since 10 September 2017 when an X8.2 flare...
Enabling & Support 02/01/2024 763 views 39 likes Through exquisite, millimetre-scale, formation flying, the dual satellites making up ESA’s Proba-3 will accomplish what was previously a space mission impossible: cast a precisely held shadow from one...
The Quadrantid meteor shower will peak this week and could bring up to 120 shooting stars per hour to the night sky.It has the potential to be the strongest meteor shower of 2024, according to the American Meteor Society, but with such a short peak — just six...
Credit: Douglas J. Struble If your observing site is dark and you have access to at least a 14-inch telescope, do yourself a favor and target the Hercules Galaxy Cluster. Its main official designation is Abell 2151, a member of a catalog of 2,712 rich northern...
A recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters investigates the potential existence of Mars-sized free-floating planets (FFPs)—also known as rogue planets, starless planets, and wandering planets—that could have been captured by our Sun’s gravity...
One of the Artemis 2 astronauts will mark his first trip in space with a trip to the moon.Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen recently shared in a video on X, formerly Twitter, how he and the rest of the Artemis 2 crew plan to get to the moon...
Pluto imaged with the New Horizons spacecraft during its historic 2015 flyby. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI/Alex Parker In 1930 a young astronomer from Kansas, employed as an observer at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, discovered Pluto. It was the first planet in the...
Light pollution ruins dark skies. It’s a scourge that ground-based observatories have to deal with in one form or another. Scientists used a small observatory in Japan to measure what changed when a nearby town improved its lighting practices. They also noted...
With the end of 2023 comes the end of an endeavor — or rather Endeavour — as the retired NASA space shuttle goes off public view for the next few years.The California Science Center in Los Angeles has exhibited OV-105, better known as the orbiter Endeavour,...