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NASA

  • Spring Patterns
    Bob Berman
    Wonderful signs of Spring now grab our attention. But the sky is also changing.The brilliant winter constellations of Orion and his friends now appear for a final few weeks. After 10pm, they’re gone.
  • Strange Universe With Bob Berman
    A new galaxy (far, far away).
    Bob Berman
    Researchers recently found the farthest-ever galaxy, a smudge at a distance of 13 billion light years.But when light travels a long time through an expanding universe, bizarre things happen.
  • This image was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), a highly efficient wide-field camera covering the optical and near-infrared parts of the spectrum. While this lovely image contains hundreds of distant stars and galaxies, one vital thing is missing — the object Hubble was actually studying at the time! This is not because the target has disappeared. The ACS actually uses two detectors: the first captures the object being studied — in this case an open star cluster known as NGC 299 — while the other detector images the patch of space just ‘beneath’ it. This is what can be seen here. Technically, this picture is merely a sidekick of the actual object of interest — but space is bursting with activity, and this field of bright celestial bodies offers plenty of interest on its own. It may initially seem to show just stars, but a closer look reveals many of these tiny objects to be galaxies. The spiral galaxies have arms curving out from a bright centre. The fuzzier, less clearly shaped galaxies might be ellipticals. Some of these galaxies contain millions and millions of stars, but are so distant that all of their starry residents are contained within just a small pinprick of light that appears to be the same size as a single star! The bright blue dots are very hot stars, sometimes distorted into crosses by the struts supporting Hubble’s secondary mirror. The redder dots are cooler stars, possibly in the red giant phase when a dying star cools and expands.
    Numbers & Stars
    Bob Berman
    April 15th is this week. That’s when taxpayers and accountants join astronomers as being obsessed with endless numbers. Although, can anyone really grasp galaxies being millions of lightyears away?
  • The Gaia Hypothesis
    Bob Berman
    It’s now a half century since James Lovelock originated the Gaia Hypothesis – which says that our planet’s biosphere is an intelligent entity that self-regulates conditions for the mutual benefit of all. Though many mainstream biologists hated it and still do, maybe Gaia doesn’t even go far enough. Why not the entire cosmos?
  • Uranus: Our 7th Planet
    Bob Berman
    On Sunday night, Match 22, the strange planet Uranus will float to the left of the crescent Moon. Here’s where the fun begins. Uranus is green because its atmosphere has lots of methane, which absorbs the sun’s red light but reflects the green and blue to our eyes.Grab those binoculars you haven’t used in years and sweep them leftward of the Moon until you see a little green star. Since actual stars are never green, you’ll know you’ve found the seventh planet.
  • Another Dimension
    Bob Berman
    In sci-fi movies, a nerdy scientist might transport himself to another dimension. In popular fiction, to qualify as another dimension means a realm must be something beyond the four dimensions of everyday reality, and thus be totally inaccessible, like public restrooms in New York. But might they really exist?
  • Our Lunar Eclipse
    Bob Berman
    We’ll get a lunar eclipse this Tuesday morning, and it’s generating a lot of buzz, especially since such eclipses have been dramatically called Blood Moons in recent years. That’s because the Moon turns reddish when the eclipse is total. In truth it’s actually a coppery hue, which isn’t really the color of blood unless there’s something very wrong with your hemoglobin.
  • This image was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), a highly efficient wide-field camera covering the optical and near-infrared parts of the spectrum. While this lovely image contains hundreds of distant stars and galaxies, one vital thing is missing — the object Hubble was actually studying at the time! This is not because the target has disappeared. The ACS actually uses two detectors: the first captures the object being studied — in this case an open star cluster known as NGC 299 — while the other detector images the patch of space just ‘beneath’ it. This is what can be seen here. Technically, this picture is merely a sidekick of the actual object of interest — but space is bursting with activity, and this field of bright celestial bodies offers plenty of interest on its own. It may initially seem to show just stars, but a closer look reveals many of these tiny objects to be galaxies. The spiral galaxies have arms curving out from a bright centre. The fuzzier, less clearly shaped galaxies might be ellipticals. Some of these galaxies contain millions and millions of stars, but are so distant that all of their starry residents are contained within just a small pinprick of light that appears to be the same size as a single star! The bright blue dots are very hot stars, sometimes distorted into crosses by the struts supporting Hubble’s secondary mirror. The redder dots are cooler stars, possibly in the red giant phase when a dying star cools and expands.
    Finding Mercury
    Bob Berman
    For the next few evenings, Mercury is at its easiest to find of the entire year. And that’s really the idea – merely to have seen it at least once in your life.
  • Solar system with eight planets.
    Mercury
    Bob Berman
    Bob Berman discusses the first planet from the Sun and the smallest in the Solar System.
  • Space Disasters
    Bob Berman
    Bob talks of the trials and tribulations of space exploration and missions.