¶ The Paragraph

2007-12-07: I saw Comet Holmes again the night before last, one of the few clear nights during this cloudy late autumn near Erie’s southern shore. Being far enough from city lights to see the milk of the Milky Way, I could just make out the comet by naked eye. But through binoculars, I saw a […]

2007-11-30: Yesterday NASA and the European Space Agency released a nice picture of galaxy M74 composed from data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2003 & 2005.x40 The galaxy is in Pisces, about 32 million light years away, and is a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way, but a bit smaller. A French astronomer, […]

Wind sweeps the North American High Plains, drying up the scant rain water30×31. But there is water enough for short grasses to flourish, and over the ages they have fed the hardy buffalo, whose massive herds “darkened the plains32“. “[The High Plains is] almost wholly unfit for cultivation,” wrote Major Stephen H. Long in 1819, […]

Last week astronomers published the discovery of something never seen before – a double helix nebula, which they found near the center of the Milky Way1. Astronomers took a picture of the nebula (shown below) using the Spitzer infrared space telescope, one of NASA’s four “great observatories”, each of which detects a different radiation band2. […]

In 1783 Rev. John Mitchell put forth the idea of a dark star, one with such gravity that light could not escape it1. But after Thomas Young showed that light acts as a wave, rather than particles, the idea lay dormant for more than a century. In 1916, on the heels of Albert Einstein’s general […]