While astrophotography has become more detailed and enriched in the last 50 years with the invention of things like color filters and digital processing, early lunar images offer more beauty and sense of wonder to the viewer. These photographs from the March 19th, 1904, issue of Scientific American  conjur feelings of curiosity for a reader, [...]

It’s only 240,000 miles away, yet this high wilderness still surprises and delights with clues about the origins of the solar system, Earth’s own water, and it even  supplies the occasional brilliant explosion. If you’ve been paying attention recently you’ll have noticed that the Moon is getting a lot of press. One reason is that [...]

When the Sun is eclipsed by the Moon this Sunday, for many observers across much of the world it will be temporarily replaced by a beautiful ring of fire – a brilliant annulus of stellar plasma just peeking out around the dark lunar disk. This doesn’t always happen, partial solar eclipses merely trim away a [...]

Sitting below the swirling leaves and darkening skies of New York today I realized that yet again our planet is roaring up on perihelion at 30 kilometers a second. This means that in about three weeks those of us in the United States will be shifting our clocks back an hour (after due reverence for [...]

The slope of an unnamed mountain near the moon’s north pole will be the final destination for NASA’s twin GRAIL spacecraft, which are scheduled to crash into the lunar surface at high speed today. The impacts are planned for 5:28 P.M. Eastern Standard Time. The twin probes, nicknamed Ebb and Flow, have orbited the moon [...]

We all learned that President John F. Kennedy launched the U.S. effort to land the first men on the moon. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” he famously stated in his Rice University speech in 1962. [...]

  Recently, I received a press release from the American Museum of Natural History on their excellent exhibit about the future of space exploration. I did a quick word search: “Mars” got 14 hits; “asteroid” 12; “moon/lunar” 11; “Europa” and “Jupiter” a total of four. A check of “Venus” came up empty. Considering that all [...]

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), which has circled the moon since 2009, is about to have some company. China launched its second lunar orbiter, known as Chang’e 2, on October 1, according to state-owned media reports. The probe lifted off just before 7:00 P.M. local time from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan Province aboard [...]

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that people often shrink a bit as they age. But we can at least take solace in the fact that the moon, too, seems to be have gotten a bit smaller of late. New imagery from a NASA spacecraft suggests that the moon may have contracted somewhat in relatively [...]

A spacecraft that performed a choreographed, two-part dive into the lunar surface in October churned up detectable levels of water ice, NASA announced Friday. The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, chased a spent Centaur rocket stage toward the moon to observe the booster’s impact into a permanently shadowed crater known as Cabeus [...]

Alex Wild over at Compound Eye is quick to point out with his Thrifty Thursday posts that great photos can be taken with relatively inexpensive equipment… IF you know what you’re doing. Here’s a great case in point: A few nights ago, I was strolling along a pedestrian mall in Boulder, CO with some friends. [...]

Story 5 Astronomers have discovered an Earth-mass planet circling Alpha Centauri B, a star only four light-years from our own solar system. Links: The Exoplanet Next-Door: Astronomers Discover World in Nearest Star System Story 4 The retired Space Shuttle Endeavour cruised the streets of Los Angeles on the way to its new home at the [...]

It was a uniquely clear night in Los Angeles, so I thought I’d try to get a shot of the full moon. Taken March 8, 2012, at 11:06pm. Speaking of full moons, here’s a fun piece from the archives: Real Life Werewolves? Dog Bites and Full Moons

Happy Halloween! I decided to revise and repost this piece from November 1, 2010, on dog bites, full moons, and confirmation bias. Click the archives icon to see the original post. Our story begins in March 2000, when Dr. Simon Chapman and colleagues from the University of Sydney published a paper in which they assessed [...]