Remember this picture? To my mind this is one of the most amazing images in the history of planetary exploration. It shows the Mars Phoenix lander descending under a parachute to the surface of Mars in 2008, and was taken…
Year: 2012
Curiosity’s Curious Path to Mars
NASA and JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) released this new video to explain the unbelievably complicated procedures by which they hope to land the Curiosity rover on Mars: Why so complicated? My favorite blogger Emily Lakdawalla begins a multi-part series today,…
Live Streaming Video of Venus Transit, June 5, 2012
Live streaming video from all over the Earth! Choose your vantage point if your location is clouded out.
Transit of Venus
Some astronomical phenomena will look very much the same regardless of your choice of vantage point. The Orion Nebula will look the same as seen from any point on the Earth from which it is visible. Indeed, it would look…
Tagged with: venus transit
Super Moons
One of the key lessons of astronomy (and perhaps of life itself) is that what you see very much depends on where you are. Consider for example this image of the moon passing in front of Saturn. Saturn is of…
Saturn and Its Rings
One of the most popular objects for telescopic viewing is the planet Saturn, with its distinctive set of wide and bright rings. First-time viewers almost inevitably will comment that it looks like a picture, not a real object. When the…
Conjunctions and Oppositions
One of the great lessons of astronomy is that appearances can be deceiving—things are not always what they seem to be. What appear to be pin pricks of light too dim to see in the daytime are in fact enormous…
A Quick Note About Videos
Those of you who read this blog as an email will likely be unable to see the embedded videos that are a part of it. For that you need to go to the blog site itself: http://redchairblostg.wpenginepowered.com/starstruck/.
Godspeed, John Glenn
When I was six years old, I wanted to be what every other six-year-old boy wanted to be in Texas—a cowboy. When I was eleven years old, I wanted to be what every kid in America wanted to be—an astronaut.…
Looking Forward to 2012
What can astronomy enthusiasts look forward to in the upcoming year? Here are some events, due to the motions of solar system bodies, that could have been predicted a century before now. Here also are events due entirely to human…
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