Category: Astronomy
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“The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand.”
– Lawrence Krauss: “A Universe from Nothing” “… It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution – weren’t created at the beginning of time.”…
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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images
For a change of pace, here are several of, the now famous images, taken by the JWST, since its launch on 25 December 2021 at 12:20 pm GMT. JWST took off from the Guiana Space Centre, also called Europe’s Spaceport, a European spaceport to the northwest of Kourou in French Guiana, a region of France in…
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If stargazing is for everyone, how do I start?
… at the beginning. Stargazing is a gateway to astronomy and astronomy is one of the few sciences that remains open to the amateur or citizen scientist – where real science can be conducted. For example, BOSS (more accurately, Backyard Observatory Supernova Search) are an amateur collaboration of 6 friends from Australia and New Zealand…
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“The most remarkable discovery in all of astronomy is that the stars are made of atoms of the same kind as those on the earth.”
– Richard P. Feynman (11 May 1918 – 15 Feb 1988) What is there to say about Richard Feynman, American theoretical physicist who was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field. His lifelong interest was in subatomic physics. In 1965, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in…
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“When we look out into space, we are looking into our own origins, because we are truly children of the stars.”
– Professor Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe, BBC Why are we here? Where do we come from? These are the most enduring of questions. And it’s an essential part of human nature to want to find the answers. We can trace our ancestry back hundreds of thousands of years to the dawn of humankind.…
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Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9
Discussing originality and plagiarism, Matthew Syed uses the release of two very similar movies in 1998, Armageddon and Deep Impact, as an example of how our brains are wired for unoriginality. He finds, in his Radio 4 series Sideways (available as a podcast), that we evolve as a collective brain, absorbing our shared cultural cues and looking…
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“While [Thales] was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet.”
![“While [Thales] was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet.”](https://stargazingguy.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/the_eclipse_of_thales_historical_eclipses.png?w=1024)
Plato, Theaetetus, 174a (trans. H. N. Fowler)Thales (624/623 BC – c548/545 BC) Thales – the father of science. According to Herodotus, Thales predicted the solar eclipse of 28 May 585 BC. The appearance of the eclipse was interpreted as an omen and interrupted a battle in a long-standing war between the Medes and the Lydians.…
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“The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church.”
– Misattributed to Ferdinand Magellan (4 February 1480 – 27 April 1521) Yes, another misattribution! Surely a misattribution of the moment: Magellan didn’t say it, but it’s still brilliant, “shadow on the Moon”. Credit: https://depositphotos.com/64932777/stock-photo-moon-phases-from-crescent-to.html So, who did say it? Also, is it true, what can the earth’s shadow on the moon tell you about…
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“If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
![“If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”](https://stargazingguy.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/depositphotos_257481036_xl.jpg?w=1024)
– Sir Isaac Newton PRS (25 December 1642 – 1726/27)* Newton was relatively modest about his achievements, writing in a letter to Robert Hooke in February 1676, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” In a later memoir, Newton wrote, “I do not know what I may appear…
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“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan. Spoken during the first episode of the 1980 landmark science series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage” titled “The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean” An earlier version of the “we are made of star-stuff” quote, was made in the 1973 Carl Sagan publication “The Cosmic Connection: An Extra-terrestrial Perspective”: “All of the rocky and…
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