September halos: Ring wraiths in the sky
Halos are the poor person’s Weather Channel: a time-honored harbinger of bad weather.
Posts Tagged 'night sky'
Is summer over? Depends whom you ask
Some say summer ends in a few days. Others say we have a few more weeks. A look at those and other ways to reckon the seasons.
Sons of Apollo
As for the “first-born son has a higher chance for success” notion, the Apollo astronauts would seem to support such a thesis strongly, since 27 of the 29 were eldest sons.
Surprises about the returning Sun
Our cloudiest month is November, but we are currently in the midst of a happy transformation.
Closest Moon of the year
The media will call it a Supermoon, astronomers will call it lunar perigee, and Hudson River tides will be stronger than usual.
Favorite numbers
Why does each cell in our body have 90 trillion atoms, roughly the same as the number of stars in our home galaxy cluster?
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.
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.
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.
