Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod's side.
Type and hit ENTER
Be Yourself. Be Happy.
Stay Positive. Always.
Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly hunted by man. To the Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod's side.
Friday, May 10, there was a lot of discussion on the news, on social media, and on different web sites about …
May 10, 2024
Posted by Andrew Fraknoi
May 10, 2024
Read More →
This time I am posting something a bit personal. I am the lead author of a free book that is part …
May 4, 2024
Posted by Andrew Fraknoi
May 4, 2024
Read More →
A rare eclipse of the Sun will be visible all over North America on April 8th.
March 23, 2024
Posted by Andrew Fraknoi
March 23, 2024
Read More →
This year February will have an extra day -- we discuss why?
February 11, 2024
Posted by Andrew Fraknoi
February 11, 2024
Read More →
Wednesday evening and Thursday morning (Dec. 13-14) is the peak time for one of the best meteor showers of the year – the Geminids.
December 10, 2023
Posted by Andrew Fraknoi
December 10, 2023
Read More →
The first images are coming in from the new Euclid Space Telescope and they are spectacular.
November 8, 2023
Posted by Andrew Fraknoi
November 8, 2023
Read More →
Friday, May 10, there was a lot of discussion on the news, on social media, and on different web sites about storms on the Sun that are unleashing great outbursts of radiation and particles, some of them toward Earth. The fact that we are seeing such “space weather” now certainly makes sense, given that the Sun has an 11-year cycle of greater and lesser activity, with the current maximum …
May 10, 2024
This time I am posting something a bit personal. I am the lead author of a free book that is part of a nonprofit experiment to help students with the costs of college. Here is the news from our publisher: OpenStax, the open textbook publisher based at Rice University, is pleased to announce that its free, openly-licensed introductory textbook, Astronomy 2e, has now been used by more than 1.1 million students. …
A rare eclipse of the Sun will be visible all over North America on April 8th.
March 23, 2024
This year February will have an extra day -- we discuss why?
February 11, 2024
Wednesday evening and Thursday morning (Dec. 13-14) is the peak time for one of the best meteor showers of the year – the Geminids.
December 10, 2023
The first images are coming in from the new Euclid Space Telescope and they are spectacular.
November 8, 2023
Saturday Oct. 14 North America will be treated to an eclipse of the Sun.
October 7, 2023
Two eclipses of the Sun will be visible in North America during the 2023-24 school year.
August 19, 2023
We make suggestions for how best to see the 2023 Perseid meteor shower.
August 5, 2023
Explains a new movie of distant galaxies and remote time from the Webb Telescope.
July 18, 2023
The Webb Telescope has found a complex building block of life in a galaxy seen just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang.
July 4, 2023
Astronomers have seen a star explode in a nearby galaxy. Such explosions are part of the recycling scheme of the universe.
May 28, 2023
On April 20, the Japanese Hakuto-R spacecraft took a remarkable image of the Earth from orbit around the Moon, showing a total eclipse of the Sun in progress near Australia. Unfortunately, the spacecraft, which would have been the first commercial mission to land on the Moon, appears to have crashed on the Moon when the controllers attempted touch down on April 25. Still, this beautiful image, showing our colorful …
April 27, 2023
What the Perseverance Rover and Ingenuity Helicopter have been doing on Mars.
April 4, 2023
Check out an Older Hubble Telescope Image that will Leave You Star-struck We astronomers often talk about the vastness of things out there — the sheer, mind-boggling numbers of stars and galaxies that make up the observable universe. That can be easier to see when you are in a remote national park on a cloudless, moonless night, but the idea is not quite so accessible when you are at …
(And A New Science Fiction Story) Here is a new image that the James Webb Space Telescope people designated their “Image of the Month.” We are looking in the direction of the constellation of Hercules, and we see one large spiral-shaped galaxy toward the bottom which is just a little more than a billion (thousand million) lightyears away! At that distance, it doesn’t have a name, but only a …
February 5, 2023
There is a faint new comet in the sky, on an orbit that took it some 50,000 years to come in from the deep-space reservoir of icy chunks that surrounds our solar system, While the media hype might lead you to think that it is going to be easily visible, don’t believe it. From any typical viewing location, you will probably need binoculars or a telescope to see it …
January 27, 2023
News of a PBS TV program on how first contact with an alien civilization might happen & a link to my latest science-fiction story on the same topic.
January 7, 2023
It's the Winter Solstice, when we experience the shortest day and longest night.
December 20, 2022
Astronomers working with the James Webb Space Telescope have just identified the most distant galaxy ever observed by human eyes. This galaxy (seen as a red dot in our image in the very center of inset box #2) is so far away that the infrared waves we see left the baby galaxy just 350 million years after the Big Bang. That’s looking back through 91% of the time that …
December 3, 2022
One of strongest hopes astronomers have for the James Webb Space Telescope is that it will reveal to us many of the details of how stars are born. Because a baby star and the “nursery” of gas and dust around it are just warming up, we can learn a lot more from its infrared rays (heat rays) than from visible light. Here we see an infrared view of part …
November 20, 2022
There will be a total eclipse of the Moon visible from all of North America on the morning of Nov. 8th.
October 24, 2022
An image combining information from the Webb and Hubble telescopes shows a pair of contrasting galaxies and holds promise for future studies.
October 9, 2022
Astronomers working with the James Webb Space Telescope recently unveiled a beautiful new image of one of the largest and most impressive regions of star formation known — the Tarantula Nebula (sometimes also called the 30 Doradus nebula after an old catalog designation.) In visible-light images, the nebula’s shape somewhat resembles the legs of a giant tarantula. This spectacular infrared image is actually a mosaic constructed of a number …
September 14, 2022
The giant planet Jupiter is shown in remarkable detail from the giant James Webb Space Telescope. The powerful northern and southern lights are easily seen in this image.
August 24, 2022
The James Webb Space Telescope has taken an intriguing image of a cosmic accident victim — a large galaxy that was hit directly in its center by a smaller neighbor. Called the Cartwheel Galaxy because of its appearance, this distant grouping of billions of stars was hit by a cosmic bullet — small spiral galaxy that pushed right through it hundreds of millions of years ago. (The “bullet” galaxy …
Soon after the scientists working with the Webb telescope released their gorgeous images for public consumption, they also started making available some of the images that were gathered as engineers checked the instruments and systems aboard the spacecraft that is the telescope. It turns out, one of set of these images held a pleasant surprise. Few people know that the planet Saturn is not the only world with a …
The James Webb Space Telescope reveals two stars at the center of a nebula that is a kind of death shroud around them.
We are looking at a brand new picture of five galaxies (islands of billions of stars), four of which actually hang out in space together. The fifth one, the one to the left, is actually in the foreground — it is 39 million light-years from us, while the other four are about 300 million light-years away. The whole group is known as Stephan’s Quintet, after French astronomer Edouard Stephan, …
July 15, 2022
Among the new James Webb Space Telescope images just released is this stunning view of a region where new stars and planets are forming — a kind of “star nursery” or “star womb.” The thick region of gas and dust is seen in browns and reds in the bottom part of the picture. The bluish “steam” that seems to be coming off upward is the glow of much thinner …
July 13, 2022
NASA has released the first image from the Webb Telescope and Einstein would be very pleased. The image shows a dense cluster of galaxies whose strong gravity warps the space around them, just as Einstein predicted in his general theory of relativity. As a result of that warping, the faint light of other galaxies that lie far BEHIND the cluster is intensified and pulled into arcs. The cluster of …
July 11, 2022
Recently, I was a guest on the Forum talk show on the San Francisco Bay Area public radio station, KQED, and got a chance to talk about astronomy news, what can be seen in the sky this summer, and the anticipation we all feel waiting for the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope. You can hear the 15-minute interview at: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101889700/celestial-events-abound-in-julys-night-skies Among the news items we discussed …
July 7, 2022
The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a wonderful new image of a huge cluster of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. Called Liller 1, after astronomer William Liller who discovered it, this group of more than a million stars is located in the direction of our Galaxy’s center. That’s a dusty region, from which regular light is absorbed. much as light from the city center on a smoggy day …
June 4, 2022
Some specialists in comet and meteor science are predicting that we COULD have a new, never-before-seen meteor shower on the night of Monday March 30th. (A meteor shower is when you can see a number of shooting stars in the dark sky over time.) Here is the full story. Meteor showers happen when an old comet (a chunk of dirty ice left over from the formation of our solar …
An international team of astronomers, working in the collaboration known as the Event Horizon Telescope, has announced the first image of the monster black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. The data were actually obtained in 2017 using 8 telescopes spanning the world, but it took until 2022 (and several supercomputers) to produce an image that shows the shadow of the black hole on the glowing …
On Sunday evening, May 15th, there will be a very nice total eclipse of the Moon visible from the U.S. (and most of North and South America). This is the kind of eclipse that you don’t need special equipment to see and is perfectly safe to watch for as long as you want. The Moon turns darker and darker, and eventually takes on a reddish glow (from red light …
May 1, 2022
I am tickled to report that one of my science-fiction short stories, about using a black hole to escape the pain of a relationship breakup, was published last week by “Theme of Absence” magazine. You can read it free online at: https://themeofabsence.com/…/slow-time-station-by…/ A short interview, with an explanation of the science behind the story, can be read at: https://themeofabsence.com/2022/04/author-interview-andrew-fraknoi/ One of my dreams has been to spend some of …
NASA announced this week that their archive of confirmed “exoplanets” — planets going around stars other than the Sun — now contains 5,000 confirmed worlds. This is an astounding number, given that in 1990, the number of known planets orbiting stars outside our own solar system was zero. And more planets are being discovered all the time. Remarkably, only 4% of the planets we have discovered so far are …
February 18 was the anniversary of the discovery of Pluto (in 1930), and thanks to the efforts of the outreach staff at the Lowell Observatory, where Pluto was found, the media have been calling it “Pluto Day” and urging celebrations and discussion. In San Francisco, I got a call from KGO radio (the city’s talk show station, where I am a regular guest) to come on and talk about …
Astronomers, using the Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments, announced today that they had seen something never before observed in a star — and they saw it in the bright reddish star Betelgeuse, found in the familiar constellation of Orion the Hunter. Andrea Dupree, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, called it a “surface mass ejection.” Betelgeuse is the only other star, besides the Sun, whose surface we can …
January 14, 2022
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is to many astronomers the space observatory of the next decade. I am happy to report that the James Webb Space Telescope, our giant heat-seeking eye in space, launched successfully, on Dec. 24 or 25, depending on which continent your clock was in. It is now on its way to its stable position, about a million miles from Earth. If you want to follow …
1. What Is Happening? On Thursday evening Nov. 18 and Friday morning Nov. 19, an almost total eclipse of the Moon will be visible from throughout the U.S. (and North and South America). In a lunar eclipse, the Moon & the Sun are exactly opposite each other in our sky, and the Earth gets between them. This means the Earth’s shadow falls on the Moon, darkening it. It’s …
Explore the Universe in a Fun, Non-credit Class On-line for People Over 50 Come explore such cosmic sights as: NASA’s new helicopter drone on MarsThe moon of Saturn’s that has an underground ocean“The pillars of creation” where astronomers see new star systems being born right nowThe monster black hole in the center of the Milky Way that got two California astronomers the 2020 Nobel prizeThe undeniable traces of the …
This Wednesday evening and Thursday morning (Aug. 11-12), there will be one of the better meteor showers of the year for you and your family to watch – the Perseids. The Moon is a skinny crescent and sets by 10 pm, so it shouldn’t interfere too much with viewing. While the best night is the evening of Aug. 11th and morning of Aug. 12th, there could be significantly more …
I am happy to report that “Flash Fiction” magazine in England today published my very short, astrobiology-theme story “I Swallowed a Martian”: https://flashfictionmagazine.com/blog/2021/07/23/i-swallowed-a-martian/ They feature a new story each day, and today it was mine. Any resonance you might find in the story with the pandemic times we are living through is unlikely to be coincidental.
July 24, 2021
There will be a nice and conveniently timed total lunar eclipse (where the Moon goes dark) during the evening of Sunday, January 20, 2019, the night before Martin Luther King Day. This means many children will not have school the next day, and can stay up to enjoy the celestial show with their families. (The eclipse is perfectly safe to look at. In a lunar eclipse, the Earth’s …
NASA’s InSight lander on Mars has sent back its first “selfie” — a great mosaic of 11 images, taken by the color camera on the “elbow” of its robotic arm. You can clearly see the round solar panels (7 feet wide) which collect power for the lander, and, between them, the instrument deck for measuring weather, marsquakes, and other conditions on Mars. Eventually, the instrument package nicknamed the mole …
December 20, 2018
On Wednesday morning, January 31, residents of North America (and particularly those on the west coast) will experience a rare triple event: * The full moon will enter the Earth’s shadow and show a total eclipse (turning the full moon into a dark reddish disk) * This will be the second full moon in the same month – something we call a blue moon * And it will be a …
By a cosmic coincidence, the first day of 2018 will have a nice full Moon in the evening. And the full Moon occurs just when the Moon is closest to the Earth in its monthly orbit, so it will look a little bigger to us in the sky. Since 2011, the media have followed a suggestion by an astrologer (!) and started calling these slightly …
Astronomers around the world have been observing a small but fast object that gives every indication of coming from some other star system. It’s the first such “interstellar” visitor we have ever observed. And it’s characteristics are quite unexpected. Most astronomers expected the first such deep-space visitor to be a comet — a chunk of icy material (which our solar system has in great abundance outside the orbits of the …
© Copyright 2024 | All Rights Reserved
Infinite Loading - Andrew Fraknoi - Astronomy Lectures - Astronomy Education Resources