The best meteors in years?
Saturday-Sunday, August 11-12: It’s all due to a backwards comet. All we need are mostly clear skies.
All posts by Bob Berman
The gemstone rainbow: Look for the Magnificent Six
Want to see it for yourself? It’s easy, if you can get to a place with an unobstructed sweep of sky to the west, south and southeast, like the Walkway over the Hudson.
The Great 2018 Mars Opposition
Friday night, July 27: That’s when the Sun, the Earth and the planet Mars form a straight line in space. Mars rises just as the Sun sets and it’s exceptionally brilliant. By coincidence, Friday night is also the July Full Moon.
Instead of looking at the relative humidity, pay attention to dewpoint
Dewpoints in the 40s and 50s mean dry air, low 60s mean medium-dry air, high 60s and 70s indicate steamy conditions.
A focus on the strange Evening Star
During the next three months, from now through September, Venus will visibly shift to the left. Each evening at nightfall, it will still hover at about the same height. But it will continually migrate south, or leftward, as it marches through the zodiac through Cancer, Leo, Virgo and into Libra.
How might extraterrestrials communicate with us?
We always assume aliens would know about circles and pi, and realize that hydrogen is the element that dominates the universe, even though most humans don’t know these things.
Do we live on a flat Earth?
Here’s how to determine Earth’s shape without trusting the government, astronaut testimony or spacecraft images.
Fascinating facts about the Evening Star
The night’s brightest object is the Moon, of course. But the second-brightest? Surprisingly, most people don’t know. That’s why a dazzling apparition can now dominate the western sky, shining a hundred times more brightly than the brightest stars, and yet travel incognito. It’s Venus, the Evening Star, and she’s in her glory from now through August.
Today’s strange Sun: Cycle 24 stays weird
Earth’s climate gets cooler when there are fewer solar storms. An extreme example happened between 1645 and 1715, when the normal 11-year sunspot cycle disappeared! This period, called the Maunder Minimum, was accompanied by bitterly cold winters in the American colonies. Fishing settlements in Iceland and Greenland were abandoned. Icebergs were seen near the English Channel. The canals of Venice froze. It was a time of great hardship.
The space race turns 60
Everyone so assumed the US would create the first satellite that it was nationally traumatic to watch the Russian “star” glide overhead.
