Dear Friends – Happy new year! With apologies for the redundancy, I’m again sending you my eclipse Q&A, since we are now barely 3 months way from the April 8 total solar eclipse. If you can get to the path of totality, you should definitely try to do so; and if not, you can enjoy […]
Dear Friends: A really cool astronomical event is coming up on Wednesday night (Dec. 7): Mars will disappear behind the Moon. This event, called an “occultation,” is essentially the same as an eclipse, in which one object passes in front of another as seen from Earth. In this case, because Mars moves very slowly relative […]
Dear Friends: With apologies for another email so soon after the last, I couldn’t help but be inspired by this morning’s successful launch of Artemis 1. I have therefore posted a short piece about it on Medium (titled “Artemis 1 Launch and Return to the Moon: Why Does it Matter?), which you can read with […]
Sept. 14, 2022 Dear Friends: Today is 13 months to the day before the next great USA solar eclipse — the annular eclipse of Oct. 14, 2023. It is also (not coincidentally) the publication day of my new book, Totality! An Eclipse Guide in Rhyme and Science. It therefore seems a good time for a […]
June 21, 2022 Dear Friends: Happy June Solstice! It’s the longest daylight of the year for the Northern Hemisphere and shortest for the Southern, but wherever you live (except far north where the sky remains bright all night at this time of year), you can enjoy a great sight this week in the early morning […]
May 12, 2022 Dear Friends: There’s been lots of exciting space news, starting with today’s announcement that the Event Horizon Telescope has successfully made the first image of the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy: You can read the press release about the black hole image here. Meanwhile, for today’s […]
Dec. 21, 2021 Happy December solstice today! The big space news item is the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), currently scheduled for Friday (Dec. 24), 7:20am EST. This is a big deal: JWST is a $10 billion instrument with the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the universe in many ways. […]
April 12, 2021 Events this week! Dear Friends: The Mars helicopter Ingenuity is now scheduled for its first test flight on Thursday: Go to this NASA page to find the updated exact time, to watch online, and to learn more about Ingenuity. Also this week (and next), I’ll be offering several free, online presentations for […]
January 22, 2021 Join Us Tuesday for a Live Event from the International Space Station! Dear Friends: Exciting news, especially for teachers and those of you with kids: Our previously postponed event for Story Time From Space will be happening this coming Tuesday, Jan. 26. We’ll have a live reading from the International Space Station (ISS) […]
Dear Friends: 2020 has been a challenging year, but it has been filled with space news and night sky excitement. I will try to catch you up in a later post on the space mission news (e.g., China’s moon rock collection mission, NASA’s Osiris-REx asteroid landing and sample collection, SpaceX sending 4 astronauts to the […]
