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esiegel | December 24, 2013"Bethany: Is your house on fire, Clark?
Clark: No, Aunt Bethany, those are the Christmas lights." -National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
Ahh, Christmas. It's easy to forget how much the invention of the light bulb in 1879 reduced the number of tree fires in people's homes. It was a mere three years later that people began decorating Christmas trees with strings of lights instead of candle flames, and as you can imagine, the reduction in open flames atop fresh kindling had its benefits, and caught on like wildfire. Trees now routinely sport previously unfathomable numbers of lights, limited…
esiegel | December 23, 2013"A sister is both your mirror - and your opposite." -Elizabeth Fishel
With 110 deep-sky wonders to choose from in the Messier catalogue, our long-running series on Messier Monday promises to keep us busy for some time to come! As we've finally passed the winter solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, many new spectacular sights await skygazers in the early part of the night. As it's also the 1-year anniversary of when we adopted a little sister for our dog from the local humane society, I thought it would only be fitting to highlight the little sister to last week's Messier object.
Image…
esiegel | November 18, 2013“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.” -Leonardo da Vinci
Welcome back to another exciting Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! As Comet ISON dives towards the Sun and a nearly perfect full Moon towers overhead, it's easy to forget about those wondrous deep-sky objects that are fixed, but the 110 prominent members of the Messier Catalogue are always on tap for dedicated skywatchers. Although the extended objects -- galaxies and nebulae -- are difficult to view with a…
esiegel | November 11, 2013"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all." -Abraham Lincoln
It might be Veterans Day / Armistice Day all around the world, but it's still Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! We may have been fighting wars for all of human history, but nearly all of the 110 deep sky objects that make up the Messier Catalogue go back long before that.
Image credit: Tenho Tuomi of Tuomi Observatory, via http://www.lex.sk.ca/.
Today, we take an in-depth look at one of the brightest and closest star clusters in the entire night sky, one that -- despite being…
esiegel | September 16, 2013"Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." -Winston Churchill
To kick off every week for nearly a year now, we've begun it with Messier Monday, where we take an in-depth look at the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the first elaborate catalogue of fixed night-sky wonders that could possibly be confused for transient comets. Originally, when first published, this catalogue was made up of 103 objects; the final 7 were added posthumously. Each one tells its own unique story, yet all of them tell a sliver of our own story,…
esiegel | May 24, 2013"Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me!" -Ronald Moore
Well, you probably don't actually want to feel the wind of a supernova flowing over you; trust me on this.
Image credit: ESO / L. Calçada, of the remnant of SN 1987a.
But to find one for yourself, that's definitely within your reach, if you know where to look.…
esiegel | February 11, 2013"Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life." -Marcel Proust
Welcome to another Messier Monday, where each week we take an in-depth look at one of the 110 deep sky objects that make up the Messier Catalogue! Messier was not the first person to try and make an accurate, large catalog of deep sky objects, but he was the first to successfully do so: most of his objects both actually exist, are deep sky objects, and had their positions recorded correctly.
Image credit: © 2008 Space-and-Telescope.com.
Most, that is, but not all. Today, we'll be looking at the open star cluster Messier 48…
esiegel | December 3, 2012"Who is wise? He that learns from everyone.
Who is powerful? He that governs his passions.
Who is rich? He that is content.
Who is that? Nobody." -Benjamin Franklin
Welcome to Messier Monday, where each week we take a journey into one of the 110 objects in the Messier Catalogue of non-cometary deep-sky objects. Ranging from stellar remnants to star clusters to globular clusters to distant galaxies and more, the Messier objects tell a rich and varied story that you can share in yourself through even the simplest of astronomical instruments.
Image credit: Rich Richins, of all 110 Messier…
esiegel | October 11, 2012"A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth." -Ernst Mach
Our Sun, like all Sun-like stars, will come to the end of its life someday. All the hydrogen fuel in its core will eventually burn up, and when this happens, the core itself will begin to contract. When temperatures are finally high enough, the end product of hydrogen fusion -- Helium-4 -- will begin to fuse in the contracted core, and the Sun will expand into a Red Giant.
Image credit: Northwestern…
esiegel | July 30, 2012"Black holes, which have no memory, are said to contain the earliest memories of the universe, and the most recent, too, while at the same time obliterating all memory by obliterating all its embodiments. Such paradoxes characterize these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order." -Robert Coover
Our Milky Way, the swath of light and dark that dominates the darkest skies here on Earth, contains a huge variety of stars: large and small, red and blue, from young to old to ancient.
Image credit: ESO / Serge Brunier, Frederic Tapissier, The World At…
esiegel | June 22, 2012"Some prophecies are self-fulfilling
But I've had to work for all of mine
Better times will come to me, God willing
Cause I can't leave this world behind" -Josh Ritter
You sure can't leave this world behind. At least, not very easily. The reason for it, of course, is gravity.
Image Credit: Physclips, via the University of New South Wales' School of Physics.
Here on the surface of the Earth, the gravitational potential well is pretty large; large enough that there's no easy way off. Sure, you can pour a huge amount of energy into a rocket to try and overcome this gravitational potential…
esiegel | 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 the skies that we all share, astronomy has a historical bias in favor of the northern hemisphere. You know this, too. Ask most people to name one single thing in the night sky, and you're most likely going to end up with this.
Image credit: Rich Richins of http://www.enchantedskies.net/.
The Big…
esiegel | 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 great canopy of the night sky.
Image credit: Chris Luckhardt at flickr.
In the northern hemisphere, they appear to rotate around the North Star, while in the southern hemisphere, the stars appear to rotate about the South Celestial Pole. The longer you observe -- or for photography, the longer you…
esiegel | 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 that flower you planted, you're there." -Ray Bradbury
Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, where we honor all the soldiers who have fought and fallen for our country. The peace and prosperity that I have enjoyed my entire life is because of a price paid, many times over, mostly by people…
esiegel | 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 Hemisphere, one of the most beloved sights of the night sky becomes ever more prominent: the Big Dipper.
(Image credit: NASA, ESA, Z. Levay (STScI) and A. Fujii.)
These seven bright stars shine high above the horizon after sunset, and will continue to do so over the rest of the Spring and all Summer…
grrlscientist | January 1, 2009tags: life cycle of a star, astronomy, physics, education, streaming video
The average star 'lives' for roughly 12 billion years. This wonderful video provides us with a visual glimpse into the entire life cycle of a G-type star, like our sun, from birth to death [6:29]
esiegel | May 14, 2008Good news for science from... the Vatican? No joke. Father Gabriel Funes, director of the Vatican Observatory and chief astronomer for the Pope, has just issued a public statement stating the following things:
Intelligent beings could exist in outer space.
Life on Mars cannot be ruled out.
The search for extraterrestrial life does not contradict belief in God.
Next year, the Vatican is organizing a conference to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin.
Whoa. And whoa's wobbly cousin, woah. Did I just step into the 21st century? After my post last week on what Americans don'…
esiegel | May 10, 2008I'm not someone who gets as excited about science-fiction space shows as many other science bloggers, but I am a fan of the current Battlestar Galactica and, especially, of Star Trek: The Next Generation. But there's one man who stands out as the hero of Star Trek: TNG, and it's the seasoned, savvy, courageous and confident Captain Picard:
Now Patrick Stewart is one cool guy, but he's nothing compared to the starship captain he played. Back in 2001, a band named Dark Materia made a techno song about Captain Picard called The Picard Song, and for me, the combination of bad techno, sound bites…
esiegel | April 17, 2008What is the future of this website? I'm going to be creating videos for the web about the Universe. I'll be answering questions ranging from what the Universe is like today to how it got to be that way. I'm going to address every step that we know of, from the Big Bang up to the present day.
And I'm going to do it naturally, by telling the story as the Universe tells it directly to us. I call this project Genesis. Check out the teaser trailer below, and tell your friends, because this is coming in January.
esiegel | April 16, 2008Ahh, stars. Giant furnaces of nuclear fusion. Doing the stuff our Sun does, burning hydrogen fuel into helium (among other things) and emitting lots of visible light and energy in the process.
But when we take a look at brown dwarfs, they aren't like normal (i.e., main sequence) stars like our Sun. Instead of burning hydrogen into helium for their fuel, brown dwarfs don't generate enough pressure to make that happen; they can only burn hydrogen into deuterium.
Let's go over what the differences here are. A hydrogen nucleus is just a proton, with a mass of 938.272 MeV/c2. (I use these units…