The Daylight Comet
Everyone eagerly anticipated Halley’s comet showing up in April 1910. It came as quite a surprise, then, when another brighter comet appeared just four months before: the Daylight Comet.
Category: Astronomy
First light
After the Big Bang the universe was dark for hundreds of million years, until the formation of the earliest stars and galaxies. And one of those galaxies was GN-z11, the oldest we have ever observed.
The mother of meteorites
When something hit Vesta, an enormous hunk of rock in the asteroid belt, it created one of the largest impact craters known, the highest mountain in the Solar System, and many of Earth’s meteorites.
Arecibo reply
In 1974 the Arecibo message was broadcast into space. In 2001 hoaxers made a reply “from aliens” in a field next to another observatory.
Religion at the poles
According to Jewish law, Shabbat begins at sundown. During Ramadan, Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset. But what do you do if the sun does not set?
Space humility
People who see our planet from outer space experience profound awe, humility, and a recognition of the fragility of life. They return to Earth changed.
Space nurse
One nurse, Dee O’Hara, took vitals and monitored astronauts on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions.
First picture from outer space
In 1946 a modified V-2 rocket took the first picture of our planet from outer space.
Fake Moon dust
How do you test Moon landers, or lunar excavation and construction processes? Get some fake moon dust, of course.
Coney Island to the moon
One of the earliest amusement park dark rides was a trip from Coney Island to the Moon and back.
Oldest satellite
Sputnik 1 orbited the Earth for three months; Sputnik 2 for nearly six months. Explorer 1 stayed in orbit for twelve years, but the fourth artificial satellite, Vanguard 1, is still flying today.
Pacific aurora
In 1962 the United States detonated a nuclear bomb in outer space over Hawai’i. It caused an artificial aurora in the sky over Honolulu – and another one over Samoa, more than four thousand kilometres away.
Science wars: The island universe
April 26, 1920, two astronomers publicly debated the structure of the cosmos. Is the Milky Way everything there is, or is it just one of many “island” universes?
Eclipse cycle
The saros is a measurement of time equal to 6585 days (plus one third of a day). It is the time between identical eclipses.
The death of Tycho Brahe
The body of famed astronomer Tycho Brahe was dug up twice (in 1901 and 2010) to find out what killed him. The conclusion: he died of excessive politeness.
Lunar garbage collection
The second mission to land on the Moon had garbage collection duty: they picked up the remains of a probe that had crashed there two years earlier.