planet

Starting in the 1920’s, some physicists like Werner Heisenberg suggested that perhaps brains receive, manipulate, and guide awareness – by steering an arching consciousness that’s a fundamental property of the universe. This week: the consciousness of the universe.

Jupiter gets its closest to earth in 2023. The giant planet at one point will be the nearest object to the moon! Hear about the mass of Jupiter and its system of moons.

Grab those binoculars you haven’t used in years and check out the Pleiades through them. Suddenly the six stars you saw with just the naked eye explode into dozens, and now you see why it’s so famous. These are newborn Suns whose life is measured in mere millions of years, not the billions of our sun and most stars.

The high sun’s weather effects still linger. Winter's typical sheets of stratus clouds and overcast lie months in our future, while puffy. Convective cumulus clouds caused by rising pockets of warm air, are still the norm. And we still experience the fact that air's capacity to hold moisture is 10 times greater now than it is in early spring and fall. So, unlike the dry air we typically get in mid-September, late August can still bring muggy conditions.

Mars now reaches its dimmest point of the year, so nobody’s now observing the Red Planet. But many still think about it. As planning for human visits to Mars continues, researchers keep studying risk. As results accumulate from astronauts who’ve spent a long time on the ISS, astrobiologists grow more concerned about space travel’s medical consequences.

The demotion of Pluto to a “dwarf planet” sparked a public controversy partially due to Disney, who in 1931 gave the name of the new planet to his likeable cartoon dog that was originally called Rover. Anyway, astronomers keep meeting people who lament Pluto’s disappearance even if most astronomers support it. With Pluto reaching its annual nearest point to Earth next Friday night, it’s a good time to revisit this whole tempest.

Venus is now at its very brightest, at magnitude -4.7, which makes beginners wonder what that means. If Venus is the most brilliant starlike object, what can we compare it with? Well, summer’s brightest stars are magnitude zero and one, which makes them 100 times less luminous than Venus. The magnitude business started with an ancient Greek named Hipparchus, who assigned each star a different magnitude. Hear the buildup to using photometers and what how certain starts became visible with time.

The vernal equinox is here! The equinox is when every place on earth rotates perpendicularly into our planet's day/night line, the terminator. As a result, the sun rises precisely due east and sets exactly in the west. So it's the easiest day to find the exact cardinal compass directions from your home, or out any window.

To the ancient Greeks the sky was crammed with mythological figures. Few resembled the people or animals they were supposed to portray. But the Greeks were gifted essay-test-takers who could fill in the blanks with the best of them, and they knew observers could always recognize a star’s brilliance. So a man named Hipparchus who lived on Rhodes devised a scheme for sorting out star brightness. Tune in to hear how his system, still in use today, assigned each star one of six different magnitudes.

We all love vacations but relatively few of us are aware of the dramatic changes to the sky when we travel. Actually, nothing happens if we shift our location east or west, like going from New York to Rome. But when we travel north or South, it’s a new universe.Hear why, when traveling, it’s worth a few minutes to gaze at the unusual sky.