Category: Astronomy
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“The wondrous thing about science is that nobody knows the right answer.”
Dr. Becky Smethurst, Astrophysicist. Science Communicator. Author. The full quote from the preface of her book (Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time) is: “The wondrous thing about science is that nobody knows the right answer. This is not how we are taught science as…
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Are comets and shooting stars the same?
Caption: Perseid Meteor from UK 12-13 Aug 2021 (credit in ALT) I was asked this question during a recent talk on stargazing. Easy question to answer, was my first thought. I started with confirming that they were indeed different phenomena and went on to discuss where comets came from, their usual long orbits (unless they…
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“… we watched the stars …”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space “Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment, we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but…
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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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