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…
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…
Wind sweeps the North American High Plains, drying up the scant rain water30x31. 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…
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…
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…