Category Archives: Astronomy

I have been following the Rosetta mission for years and I have been completely captivated by the Philae probe (Figure 1) landing on the surface of the comet C67P (Figure 2). In addition to watching the television coverage of the landing, I have been reading all the articles I could find. Most of the articles I have read quote information from the ESA website. There is quite a bit of information available on technical details like the battery capacity, lander mass, and power usage. Continue reading →

I am just amazed at the new technology in telescopes today. Take a look at this article – these are the kinds of instruments that will change our view of the universe. If you have trouble getting access at PhotonicsSpectra, … Continue reading →

One of my favorite online magazines is +Plus. I was reading an article in +Plus today about how the Kepler satellite finds exoplanets and the article mentioned a simple formula for the probability of Kepler being able to detect a planet. I thought it would be interesting to discuss this formula here because it involves a simple formula that provides insight into cutting-edge science. Continue reading →

While reading some articles on the Mars rovers, I saw this pair of pictures showing the Opportunity rover's solar panels first deployed in January 2004 and today − its solar panels are now very dirty (Source). There was a time … Continue reading →

I was listening to an astronomer on the radio answering questions on viewing stars and planets. A question was asked about why we can have beautifully detailed photos taken from Earth of distant astronomical objects (e.g. Crab Nebula) but we cannot seem to obtain detailed photos of objects in our solar system like Pluto (Figure 1). The astronomer answered that the distant objects are huge and that we view them from Earth as having a larger viewing angle than a minor planet in our solar system. I thought it might be interesting to look at the relative viewing angle of these two objects when viewed from Earth. Continue reading →

Introduction While looking up some information on the Moon, I ran into an interesting set of web pages that describes an experiment to measure the distance to the Moon with centimeter-level accuracy. This experiment sends a stream of laser pulses … Continue reading →

Introduction I like thinking about the possibility of habitable exoplanets. There are many interesting questions that people can ask about exoplanets. Here are a few questions that are interesting to think about: How many intelligent civilizations are present in our … Continue reading →