The worst time for clouds
On Saturday and Sunday nights, Dec. 15 and 16, Bob expects Comet Wirtanen to achieve naked-eye visibility – the first comet in years to do so.
All posts by Bob Berman
Comet over the Hudson Valley and other cool stuff for December
Comet Wirtanen will soon pay Earth its closest-ever visit. It should be large and blobby-looking, appearing as a fuzzy glob the size of the full Moon.
Going to Mars…or at least gazing at it
The Martian surface air is 30 times thinner than the air atop Mount Everest. And if that weren’t bad enough, all that thin, barely-there gas is carbon dioxide: no oxygen. You can’t breathe there.
Nature-lover’s tip: Look opposite the Sun
By day the antisolar point is marked by the shadow of your head. At night it’s the most happening place in the heavens.
Bucket-list sky phenomena
Here are my top six sky apparitions that belong on everyone’s bucket list, most of which appear in your own backyard.
The consummate sky-speaker
One word is so consistently mispronounced that I’ve been repeatedly corrected when I say it the right way, which is why it drives me bonkers.
Those Lagrangian Points
You go there when you want privacy. Lagrangian points are very cool. So why haven’t we ever explored them in the 44 years this column has run?
Is the universe conscious?
How can such an intangible thing as the fact of awareness, such as experiencing the smell of buttered corn, arise from the insentient atoms and molecules that fashion our bodies?
Find the black hole in the center of our galaxy this weekend
Friday-Saturday, Sept. 14-15: There’s probably a supermassive black hole in the core of every galaxy. Ours has the weight of four million Suns.
Ring around the Sun: The magnificent 22-degree halo
Summer offers a profusion of ice-crystal phenomena.
