Did you catch the lunar eclipse this morning? My daughter and I got up at 3am to check out the red moon through the telescope. I think the coolest thing was being able to see stars around the moon through the telescope. Usually it’s so bright it will block out everything else nearby, but this …
Continue reading ‘Full moon + lunar eclipse + winter solstice = wow’ »
There was a beautiful full moon tonight and I got some pretty decent photos with my telescope and camera: I think I found my new desktop wallpaper. 😉
Using the last 200 years of American history as his template for Martian history, Robinson projects his tale of Mars’s colonization from the 21st century, in which settlers successfully revolt against Earth, into the next century, when various interests on Mars work out their differences on issues ranging from government to the terraforming of the …
The sequel to Red Mars details an early 22nd-century Mars controlled by Earth’s metanationals, gigantic corporations intent on exploiting Mars. Debate among the settlers–some native-born, some the surviving members of the First Hundred–is divided between the minimalist areoformists, who have come to love Mars in all its harshness, and the terraformists, who want to replicate …
For eons, sandstorms have swept the barren desolate landscape of the red planet. For centuries, Mars has beckoned to mankind to come and conquer its hostile climate. Now, in the year 2026, a group of one hundred colonists is about to fulfill that destiny. John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov lead a …
25 years have passed since humanity quarantined the mysterious aliens known as Moties within the confines of their own solar system. They have spent a quarter century analyzing and agonizing over the deadly threat posed by the only aliens mankind has ever encountered, doomed by millions of years of evolution to an inescapable fate. For …
Phssthpok the Pak had been traveling for most of his thirty-two thousand years. His mission: save, develop, and protect the group of Pak breeders sent out into space some two and a half million years before … Brennan was a Belter, the product of a fiercely independent, somewhat anarchic society living in, on, and around …
Now future space travelers won’t have to enjoy their morning coffee through a straw from a bag. Astronaut Dr. Don Pettit invented a zero-G coffee cup during his current stay on the International Space Station. I heard about this on episode #859 of Buzz Out Loud and from there found the clip above on collectSPACE. …
This is technology of a different sort, but still cool. While in Arizona earlier this year on vacation, my wife and I stopped at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. The visit rekindled our childhood interests in astronomy. For our combined birthdays, we bought an Orion XT6 Dobsonian: a Newtonian reflector telescope with a 6″ mirror …