This may seem like a pretty trivial question: save during an eclipse, or when the Moon is low on the horizon and seen through a thick layer of dirty atmosphere, 99.999% of people will answer “grey”, although some romantics will offer “silver”. When you look up at the Moon in the night sky, the predominant [...]
Many explanations have been proposed for the Star of Bethlehem, the star that guided the Magi to Jerusalem. One of the most popular is that of the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn that took place during 7BC. Although it is not exactly the same event that is repeating this Christmas, sky watchers can see an [...]
NASA is gearing-up in a big way to return to the Moon. As of now, and COVID-19 permitting, the first flight of the new Artemis programme that will take astronauts back to the Moon will be in November 2021, with a Moon landing planned for October 2024. AArtemis I is planned to be a long-duration [...]
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence Carl Sagan, 1980 [This is a quick-reaction piece that is being polished and updated constantly. Last updated: October 1st] Through the day today there have constant reports in social media and elsewhere in the Internet, leaking news of the discovery of evidence of microbial life in the atmosphere of Venus, [...]
This is a posting that is unashamedly for Apollo nerds. If you are over sixty years old, you probably remember Apollo and lived the Moon landings, at least the first one, as I did. People of my generation are bathing in a stream of glittering memories as we pass the fiftieth anniversary of one epic [...]
Who remembers Apollo 12? It should have been the flight that gave the American public a television spectacular that knocked spots off the short Apollo 11 moonwalk. The first moon landing was basically a PR exercise: the moonwalk was the shortest possible and science was almost an afterthought. The Apollo 11 landing was to give [...]
Earlier this week, my attention was drawn by a colleague to the poll in Twitter below, started last summer by a prominent Spanish footballer (ex-Captain of the national team, so you suppose that he must be fairly level-headed). The player in question recounted how he was arguing over dinner the previous night about whether or [...]
The Red Planet has fascinated man for centuries, ever since the first telescopic observations that revealed pole caps, seasonal changes and signs of atmosphere. A new study is likely to re-open the debate about the possible presence of fossils in Martian rocks, even though it is unlikely that the claims made will be accepted. For [...]
Some months back I made some from the hip comments about ‘Oumuamua, that strange little visitor from outside the solar system. Some of them were superseded by later events, others are certainly debatable. However, in the last week or so, ‘Oumuamua has been in the spotlight due to renewed speculation that it could be artificial, [...]
December 16th. The day that the comet that could have been famous will fly by Earth at only 30.4 times the distance of the Moon. Could have been famous? Yes, had things worked out differently, a generation of space fans would have been learning to say “Wirtanen” (it is Vir-tanen) instead of “Churyumov-Gerasimenko” (Chury to [...]
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