I’m in love. With Venus. What is it about this planet that excites me each time it returns to the evening or morning sky? Venus spends weeks or months lost in the solar glare. Finally, with great perseverance, it frees itself from the sun’s grasp and shines with a bright light of its own like…
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When a massive star runs out of fuel it dies spectacularly, collapsing under its own weight and exploding as a supernova. While the outer layers of the star fly away in the ungodly eruption, there’s often a tiny remnant left behind called a neutron star. Normally, electrons and protons in a star’s core keep their…
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A reminder that tonight is the peak of the annual Geminid meteor shower (Dec. 13-14). The Geminids will stream from a point in the sky in the constellation Gemini the Twins, located above Orion and his famous belt. You can watch the meteor display beginning as early as 9 o’clock local time, but the greatest…
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Incredibly, every week about 40 new Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are discovered. NEOs are objects that pass near the Earth as they orbit the sun. We know of more than 20,000 NEOs at the moment, the vast majority of which are small asteroids. Even if they were to cross Earth’s orbit one day and crash into our…
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Tonight’s the Full Cold Moon, a good fit for the temperatures expected at my home this evening. Watch for the fat moon to rise around sunset and shine all night as it rides Taurus the Bull from horizon to horizon. The moment of greatest fullness occurs at 11:12 p.m. Central Time (12:12 p.m. Eastern, 10:12…
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