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Let's Look for Meteors!

Let's Look for Meteors! Here's how to see the Perseid shower tonight!

Today marks 5 months since the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and everyone stopped going to school, to work, out in public, and we all just stayed home to stop the spread. In this time, people have learned to adapt their careers, and parents have done their best to educate their kids in the absence of formal public education. Still, we long for some non-screen entertainment (he said, while…

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Everything you need to know about Mars 2020

Everything you need to know about Mars 2020

Recently, NASA launched it’s next rover to Mars, following the 2012 arrival of Curiosity (I also can’t believe it’s been 8 years). The Perseverance rover has begun it’s 7 month journey, and to bring everyone up to speed, I made a video about the rover, the launch and landing, science instruments, science goals, and anything else that you need to know!

Enjoy!

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Summer Astrophotography - A Passion Project

Summer Astrophotography – A Passion Project

I love being a science communicator, being with people and sharing my knowledge of the universe. However, I have a personal fascination with the universe, and although this helps me learn more and ultimately makes me a better communicator, there is something nice about connecting with the stars in a traditional way, ie with a telescope.

Every year, usually in Summer (a short season in…

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Using Stellarium to Find Comet NEOWISE

Learn how to use Stellarium to Find Comet NEOWISE from your home! #Comet #NEOWISE #Space #Science #Education #Astronomy

It’s an amazing time to look up to the night sky! For the first time in nearly 6700 years, comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE has made it’s return to the inner solar system. These small, icy, dirty clumps remain dim and dark through over 90% of their journey from the distant reaches of the Solar System, but once they close in on the immense heat of our nearest star, things change.

Comet C/2020 F3…

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An Amazing Year and a Fresh Start.

An Amazing Year and a Fresh Start.

It’s been a very long time since I took a crack at blogging. I enjoy writing. I miss writing. I spent a year and a half blogging nonstop, and it’s a skill I don’t want to lose. I don’t want to move back to writing daily, though I do enjoy reporting on astronomy and space news. I also want to talk more about my life as a planetarium operator, if only for some self-reflection, which is always a…

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Summer 2019 Astrophotography (So Far)

Summer 2019 Astrophotography (So Far)

After several years of off and on blogging, I’m still trying to figure out what to put in this blog. I tried to make it an astronomy news blog, and posted every day for about 2 years. This certainly improved my writing and forced me to think quickly when writing content, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do.

I tried other content, but I found that I wasn’t passionate about non-astronomy things.…

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New Horizons and Ultima Thule - Two Perspectives

New Horizons and Ultima Thule – Two Perspectives

This post is a collaboration with my good friend Bob Wegner, a professional musician, amateur astronomer, and genuinely good person.

With the New Horizons spacecraft passing Ultima Thule on New Year’s eve 2019, Bob and I noticed that Queen guitarist and astronomer Brian May was on hand for the live event, playing a newly-written song to mark the event. Bob and I often talk about astronomy,…

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Windy Martian Plains

It’s been a busy few weeks on Mars, with the InSight Lander arriving in late November, making it the newest member of the Martian robotic ground team.

The science hasn’t started yet, but the first photos of the landing area have come back, and testing of the science instruments has begun, with the first big reveal coming late last week – the first recording of Martian wind.

Landed Martian…

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Podcasting about Astronomy

I love working on different projects every day.  Some days I present planetarium shows, some days I do a radio show, some days I’m doing video conference calls with school children, and some days I’m on TV commenting on recent space news.  I enjoy the variety that being a science communicator offers.  In that spirit, I want to introduce a project I’ve been working on for the past year, a podcast…

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One Planet Hunter to Another

One Planet Hunter to Another

It wasn’t long after the discovery of exo-solar planets that scientists sent up spacecraft to look for them.  The Kepler Space Telescope (KST) was NASA’s first planet finder, which has been exceeding expectations since 2009.  It likely won’t get to continue on that road, as it is nearing the end of it’s life.  At the same time, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is just starting to…

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A Dusty Martian Opportunity

A Dusty Martian Opportunity

Mars is a planet wide desert with underground and polar cap water, but it’s general arid environment and occasional wind give rise to dusty weather events such as tornado-like dust devils and local dust storms.  Every so often, one of these little dust storms expands and becomes a planet wide phenomena, and in early June this is exactly what happened. So what does it mean for our rovers and…

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Pluto Planet Problem

I’m going to come right out and ask the burning question: Is Pluto a Planet?

Pluto false colour image: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute

No. At least under the current definition.  So the question becomes “Should Pluto be a planet?” 

That answer is a bit more complicated.  Let’s look at the history.  

Discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930,…

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Star Closeup

I really enjoy looking at images of the Sun from one of the several round-the-clock monitoring systems.  It’s fascinating that the public can get access to almost real time images of the Sun and see what’s going on in several wavelengths.  I’ve always hoped to see what other stars look like in the future, and today, that future is one step closer.  Here’s a brand new picture of another star!

Euro…

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Navigation by Pulsar

On the golden record that accompanies the Voyager spacecraft, there is a map showing the location of Earth.  It’s not a road map that you might pull out when navigating a city, but a 3D map showing the location of a star, the Sun, in a populous galaxy.  But just how would this map work? And more importantly, what are the map markers?

Credit: NASA

If you notice the lines at the bottom left of the…

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Kepler Discovers 8-Planet System

Moments ago, NASA announced that the Kepler space telescope, for the first time ever, has discovered a star that has a system of 8 planets, similar to our own solar system.

Kepler Space Telescope, artist’s rendering. Credit: NASA/JPL

The exceptional part of the discovery is that it was found in existing Kepler data, using google artificial intelligence software that was trained to find positive…

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The Ancient Collision That Everyone Saw

The Ancient Collision That Everyone Saw

The year is 1987, and on February 23rd, three separate neutrino observatories experienced a huge burst in detections. Although initially unsure of their origin, the next day a Supernova was discovered in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way visible in the southern hemisphere.  Known as 1987A, it was the closest supernova observed in centuries, and was observed by…

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The Trials of Solar Eclipse Photography

The Trials of Solar Eclipse Photography

Although the August 21st eclipse happened about 6 weeks ago, I realized it would take me a long time to edit all the photos I took during my trip.  I had over 2000 individual shots of the eclipse alone, taking a single (1/4000 s) shot every 10 seconds, at ISO 100, with my telescope coming out at around f/6.  I’ve done a lot of time-lapse photography before, so I thought it would be a routine…