Popular Posts

• Nasa: The Complete Illustrated History

  This fascinating book now updated and available in paperback to mark the 50th anniversary of NASA in 2008 tells the remarkable history of America’s unrivalled contribution to the exploration of space from the early twentieth century to the present. Award-winning historian Michael H. Gorn covers every US space mission ever undertaken, including those of projects Mercury, [...]

• A Year of the Stars: A Month-By-Month Journey of Skywatching

  One look at a starry night sky is often enough to arouse an individual’s curiosity and generate a desire to discover the wonders of the heavens. But how do you learn the identities of all those stars and constellations and when they appear? What is a planetary nebula or a globular star cluster–where do you [...]

• Strange Things in Space

  Antimatter Like Superman’s alter-ego, Bizzaro, the particles making up normal matter also have their opposite versions. An electron has a negative charge, for example, but its anti-matter equivalent, the positron, is positive. Matter and anti-matter annihilate each other when they collide and their mass is converted into pure energy. Mini black holes Related [...]

• On Sunspots

  Galileo’s telescopic discoveries, and especially his observation of sunspots, caused great debate in an age when the heavens were thought to be perfect and unchanging. Christoph Scheiner, a Jesuit mathematician, argued that sunspots were planets or moons crossing in front of the Sun. Galileo, on the other hand, countered that the spots were on or [...]

• Astronomy: Pisces Constellation

  Astronomy hasn’t always been a science, it was at one time more closely connected to astrology than it currently is. But over time theories were tested and recorded by men who wanted answers. These were men such as Ptolemy who imagined the solar system way back in 100AD, as well as Galileo who was the [...]