The dark side of the full moon
When the Full Moon arrives next Saturday night, the 27th, let’s finally learn its brightness. For, in the mass media the past 20 years or so, all sorts of make-believe things have been presented about the Full Moon.
Columns
Susan Slotnick: Vaccines for prisoners
The question concerning prisoner’s rights to vaccinations is one of medical ethics. Who has the right to decide whose life is more valuable and deserves to be saved? Should a person who committed terrible acts of violence be prioritized before a taxpaying law-abiding citizen? What also of the people in prison, and there are many, who should not have been imprisoned at all? If it was up to you to choose, what would you do?
What telescope should you buy?
It’s the most frequently asked question in amateur astronomy. Here, an astronomer offers some guidance.
A change in fortune
I met him when he joined a program I was facilitating in an Ulster County prison. Although he was younger than me, he looked ancient — an old man, old before his time. He hobbled into the room, in pain from sciatica with his 55 years locked up in airless spaces, with minimal good food and health care, bad teeth showing through a wane smile, sparse gray hair falling on his shoulders. Resignation and abdication were the expressions he wore, a surrender born of hopelessness.
See the year’s best meteors this weekend
This Sunday night, December 13, we’ll see the year’s finest meteor shower. These are the Geminids and they deliver a meteor a minute.
Night Sky: God and the geniuses
I’m periodically asked if I’ve seen evidence among the stars of a Creator. I always dodge such questions, directed my way for over 30 years. They arise because many, when searching for the Big Picture in this huge confusing universe, think astronomers may have a heightened perspective of what’s going on.
Susan Slotnick: What was to come
How could I have known what was to come the day the drive over the mountain, through the Hudson Valley
Gloomy mysteries of November
Many feel ‘downbeat’ starting around now, with a strange heaviness striking a large minority of the population in November. Its underlying mechanisms are fascinating.
Night Sky: Five-minute wonders
This is a good time because the moon is absent this weekend. And there’s a bunch of cool stuff to see and it’s all very easy to find. I’ll prove it.
Carbon dioxide explained
If you know any skeptics regarding carbon dioxide, or who are not freaked by the earth’s still-new milestone of hitting 400 parts per million, just point upward any night, and show them how it operates elsewhere in the universe.