June 15, 2012
"I would rather be adorned by beauty of character than jewels. Jewels are the gift of fortune, while character comes from within." -Plautus
When it comes to astronomy, there's no doubt that I've got a northern hemisphere bias. It's no surprise, of course; I live here. And while I often write about…
June 14, 2012
"Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody." -Mark Twain
Back before the telescope was invented, Saturn was known as the Old Man of the Skies. The slowest-moving of the naked-eye planets, it's the only one that would reliably be in nearly the same location, year after…
June 12, 2012
"I went into a clothing store, and the lady asked me what size I was. I said, 'Actual'. I'm not to scale." -Demitri Martin
When you look out at the Universe, what you can see is limited, at the most fundamental level, by the size of what you look with. This is why you can see dimmer objects at…
June 9, 2012
"Art has never been a popularity contest." -James Levine
Sometimes, you might feel like you've heard it all, seen it all, and that nothing's original anymore. But I beg to differ. Just because great things have come before doesn't mean that there aren't great things happening right now. While it…
June 8, 2012
"Building one space station for everyone was and is insane: we should have built a dozen." -Larry Niven
Here on the solid ground of the Earth, the Sun and Moon rise and set on a daily basis. During the hours where the Sun is invisible, blocked by the solid Earth, the stars twirl overhead in the…
June 6, 2012
"You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right." -Randall of xkcd
In January of 2008, I began writing this blog, Starts With A Bang, both for myself and for all of you, because we all have something in common.
Image credit: © Stéphane Guisard, "Los Cielos de…
June 5, 2012
Image credit: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Good luck, clear skies and great viewing for everyone out there trying to see the Venus Transit!
Update 1: Watch the event live here, or watch the embedded NASA video stream, below:
Live video from your Android device on Ustream
Update 2: here are…
June 4, 2012
"Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties." -James Jeans
Here on Earth, every living thing is based around four fundamental, elemental building blocks of life: hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and, perhaps most importantly, carbon.
Image Credit:…
June 2, 2012
"If a 'religion' is defined to be a system of ideas that contains unprovable statements, then Gödel taught us that mathematics is not only a religion, it is the only religion that can prove itself to be one." -John Barrow
Image credit: Codex Vindobonensis 2554 (French, ca. 1250), in the…
June 1, 2012
"The moon shuts off the beams of the sun as it passes across it, and darkens so much of the earth as the breadth of the blue-eyed moon amounts to." -Empedocles, ~450 B.C.
Less than two weeks ago, I saw my first annular eclipse, with some spectacular results at the moment of maximum eclipse.
From…
May 31, 2012
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -Douglas Adams
Here inside the Milky Way galaxy, all you need are some dark skies and a decent set of eyes,…
May 28, 2012
"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or…
May 27, 2012
"Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead." -Kyle Reese, the Terminator
Sure, they may look innocent now. Maybe you think they'll…
May 26, 2012
"This seems to be the law of progress in everything we do; it moves along a spiral rather than a perpendicular; we seem to be actually going out of the way, and yet it turns out that we were really moving upward all the time." -Frances Willard
As spring gives way to summer here in the Northern…
May 24, 2012
"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot." -D.H. Lawrence
Here in our Solar System, the planet closest to our Sun is Mercury, speeding around in a complete orbit once every 88 days, with daytime temperatures reaching a…
May 23, 2012
"As always on this boulevard, the faces were young, coming annually in an endless migration from every country, every continent, to alight here once in the long journey of their lives." -Brian Moore
Even the Universe experiences a "great migration" every now and again, where giant, massive globules…
May 21, 2012
"A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success." -Elbert Hubbard
I've had the great fortune in my life to see a great many wonderful things with my own eyes, including the rings of Saturn, the phases of Venus, a couple of faint,…
May 19, 2012
"But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn't know the…
May 17, 2012
"The Earth destroys its fools, but the intelligent destroy the Earth."
-Khalid ibn al-Walid
Usually, when we talk about terraforming, we think about taking a presently uninhabitable planet and making it suitable for terrestrial life. This means taking a world without an oxygen-rich atmosphere, with…
May 15, 2012
"The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from burns and blast effects, they had absorbed enough radiation to kill them. The rays simply destroyed body cells - caused their nuclei to degenerate and broke their walls." -John Hersey
Everyone (well,…
May 11, 2012
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." -Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut may have it right for most of us, but not all of us spend all of our time on Earth. A select dozen of us, in fact, have made it, as Cat Power would sing, to
The Moon.
Image…
May 10, 2012
"They say 'A flat ocean is an ocean of trouble. And an ocean of waves... can also be trouble.' So, it's like, that balance. You know, it's that great Oriental way of thinking, you know, they think they've tricked you, and then, they have." -Nigel Tufnel
Black holes* are some of the most perplexing…
May 8, 2012
"There's nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you."
-Woody Hayes
There's no doubt that we lucked out when it came to the formation of our Solar System.
Image credit: Michael Pidwirny, retrieved from cosmosportal.org.
Our inner Solar System, where temperatures are…
May 6, 2012
"There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody." -Adlai E. Stevenson
One of the worst feelings that I've ever experienced is when I feel as though someone has played me for a fool, and fleeced me out of my time, my money, and my trust. The Dang-Its…
May 5, 2012
"Without a wish, without a will,
I stood upon that silent hill
And stared into the sky until
My eyes were blind with stars and still
I stared into the sky." -Ralph Hodgson
The next month -- from May 5th to June 5th -- brings three of the most spectacular astronomy sights possible on Earth back-to-…
May 2, 2012
"This is the way I wanna die. Torn apart by angry fans who want me to play a different song." -Regina Spektor
You're familiar with the classic picture of a black hole: a dark, dense region at the center from which no light can escape, surrounded by an accretion disk of matter that constantly feeds…
May 1, 2012
"A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us." -John Steinbeck
Here on Earth, we all get to enjoy the delight of being located in an extremely…
April 28, 2012
"They will see us waving from such great heights
'Come down now,' they'll say.
But everything looks perfect from far away
'Come down now,' but we'll stay." -The Postal Service
Whether you're under urban, city skies, where only a few dozen stars are visible on a clear night, or beneath some of the…
April 27, 2012
"And what I wanted to do was, I wanted to explore problems and areas where we didn't have answers. In fact, where we didn't even know the right questions to ask." -Donald Johanson
You can learn an awful lot about the Universe by asking it different questions than you asked about it previously. If…
April 25, 2012
"Through that last dark cloud is a dying star... And when it explodes, it will be reborn. You will bloom... and I will live." -The Fountain
I want to start off by letting you all know that I, myself, do not have any children of my own. I have taught children, adolescents and adults for nearly a…
