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.
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Exploring the Universe
with Andrew Fraknoi
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 …
March 17, 2023
(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
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