I mentioned a few weeks ago how, in my copious spare time, I’m trying to brush up on astronomy. I ordered a text book that came highly recommended, Astronomy Today, 7th edition, put out by Pearson, and so far, I’ve found the time to get through exactly one chapter of that text book. But it…
Any science fiction writer who tries their hand at hard science fiction usually ends up doing some back-of-the-envelope calculating and figuring. It comes with the territory. Having a background in astronomy or physics often helps. It can be fun, calculating the acceleration of a spacecraft, figuring how long it will take to get from point…
My astronomy text book arrived today and it couldn’t have come at a better time. I am entered the part of my story that requires some information on Pluto, as well as some calculations of spacecraft orbits and other little tidbits like that, and I can put the new text book to use for at…
The first astronomy book I ever read was The Nine Planets by Franklyn M. Branley when I was six years old. What caught my interest in astronomy at that young age were the pictures in the newspaper of Jupiter as the Voyager spacecraft made its flyby. My parents got me a telescope and I started…
One of the awesome gifts I got for Christmas this year from my in-laws was a copy of the The Nine Planets by Franklyn M. Branley. I’ve mentioned this book numerous times over the years on this blog. It is the book that turned me onto science back when I was a first-grader. I discovered…
Okay, someone really needs to reprint Isaac Asimov’s excellent essay, “The Bridge of the Gods” which is all about light and rainbows. I’ve been seeing stuff all over about remarkable “double-rainbows” as if this is a new or even a rare phenomenon, but as Asimov explains in his essay, there is a very good explanation…
14 years ago today, I began reading Carl Sagan‘s book, The Demon-Haunted World, after reading an excerpt of it in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Three days later, I learned that Sagan had died and it was a sad day for me and for the cause of science and rationality as a whole. I wrote about this a…
Two nights ago I braved the bitterly cold weather to check the mail. When I got outside, I looked up into a midnight blue sky, crystal clear in the cold air with stars shimmering brightly, and immediately saw a meteor disintegrate in the upper atmosphere. I remembered then that it was about the time of…