space exploration

Here’s a twist on the expression “Blue Moon.” This coming Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at around 8 p.m., lower in the western sky, the nearest star to the crescent Moon will be the bluest of them all, which is Virgo’s brightest star, Spica. The lovely twilight of dusk will still be visible though fading, and the low waxing crescent Moon is always an ancient, evocative sight all by itself.

Every summer there’s a great meteor shower, the Perseids. Some years they are spectacular, other years you only see a tenth of what’s happening. We’ll hear how visible the shooting stars will be this year.

We all know the names of the planets. Many people can even recite them in their correct order from the Sun. But actually seeing them in a line – well, that’s something special. And this month we’ll explain how and when that’s happening.

The Big Bang theory, strongly supported by the cosmic microwave background and the cosmic expansion rate, says that starting 13.8 billion years ago, everything initially raced away from everything else like an inflating balloon.

June 5 begins the 6-day period when the Moon is at its absolute best. Many imagine that the Full Moon is the jewel of the heavens. But astronomers know that that’s when to close up shop and forget the universe. The Full Moon is disappointing because the sun then shines straight down like a flash camera to erase all shadows, making its wonderful craters disappear. As if that wasn’t bad enough, its light is then so brilliant that all the lovely nebulae and galaxies and most meteors seem to vanish because they can’t compete against such a bright background. Surprisingly, the Full Moon isn’t merely twice as bright as a half Moon, but 10 times brighter!

Neutron stars don't get much attention these days. They're not as notorious as black holes, nor as capable of fully warping spacetime. But this story really started before dawn on July 4, 1054, when a new brilliant star abruptly appeared near the left horn of Taurus the Bull, very close to where the Sun is located during the next few weeks. It was seen in broad daylight for more than a month. Good backyard telescopes show this as the remnant of an exploded star 6,500 light-years away, whose tendrils still rush outward at a thousand miles a second, visibly altering the nebula every few years.

Sunday night, May 15, we see a total eclipse of the moon. It is especially welcome because for the last couple of years every lunar eclipse has been penumbral, meaning the moon failed to touch even the edge of Earth’s shadow.

Can you name worthy sky-spectacles that don’t require knowledge of constellations, any equipment like a telescope or even binoculars, that are easy to find and strikingly fascinating? Most would cite eclipses, auroras, and meteor showers as filling all those check-boxes. But there’s one more category. Bright conjunctions! Tune in to hear about dazzling conjunctions and what makes them so spectacular.

This week we’ll hear about our galaxy’s five most abundant elements, the remaining seven dozen elements (which together they make up just 4% of the universe) and the unknown dark matter.

If you’re hearing this Sunday, well, at 11:33 this morning Eastern Daylight Time, it’s the vernal equinox, when we read that "Day and night are equal." But some people must surely glance at their local sunrise and sunset listings and see that day is longer than night at the equinox. Real equality happened several days ago. The culprit is our atmosphere, which bends the sun’s image upward. But, hey, it’s close enough. Like the date itself. If "March 21" pops to mind, you're probably over 50. The final March 21 equinox happened 32 years ago.