Over the next week or so I’ll be posting highlights of my summer trip to Canada’s maritime provinces with my girlfriend Kate. We had a blast, and love to have adventures and experiences in new places. This is our story of the things we did and what we thought of them. Day 5 saw us leave Kejimkujik National Park, drive the South coast of NS, stop in the famous Peggy’s Cove, drive Gill to the airport, have our own lobster dinner, and visit my friend Blair for some local beers! We woke up to another lovely morning, this time in...
Over the next week or so I’ll be posting highlights of my summer trip to Canada’s maritime provinces with my girlfriend Kate. We had a blast, and love to have adventures and experiences in new places. This is our story of the things we did and what we thought of them. Day 4 brought us the fun of Tidal Bore Rafting, and a long long drive to Kejimkujik National Park and Dark Sky Reserve! We woke up feeling refreshed, though Kate felt a bit tired. We said goodbye to Hank (tank) and drove up north toward Truro for tidal bore...
Over the next week or so I’ll be posting highlights of my summer trip to Canada’s maritime provinces with my girlfriend Kate. We had a blast, and love to have adventures and experiences in new places. This is our story of the things we did and what we thought of them. Next up is Day 3, after a long day of travelling we find ourselves on the ocean in PEI. Day 3: There is nothing quite like waking up on the ocean after a long day of travelling. Smelling the fresh and salty sea air, seeing the Sun low above...
If you ask someone what the craziest, most powerful, energetic, and enigmatic thing in the universe is, chances are they will say a black hole. After all, we know so little about them, we have never directly seen one, and we can see their influence across space and time. But there is apparently another notch on the crazy powerful cosmic object front. Like turning the volume knob to eleven, a binary system of supermassive black holes has been discovered in a nearby quasar. A quasar is an incredibly bright core of a distant galaxy, shining brighter than the entire galaxy...
Over the next week or so I’ll be posting highlights of my summer trip to Canada’s maritime provinces with my girlfriend Kate. We had a blast, and love to have adventures and experiences in new places. This is our story of the things we did and what we thought of them. Today was day 2, which involved a long drive mixed with sightseeing and sunshine. Day 2: The Sun greeted us in the morning, and we had a lovely breakfast next to the coldest air conditioner ever, seriously I could see my breath, it was glorious. Some other travelers enjoyed...
Over the next week or so, I’ll be posting some highlights of my trip to the maritime provinces with my girlfriend Kate. I’ll post a few photos, likes and dislikes, and talk about some of the really cool experiences we had. I also did a fair bit of astrophotography, so I’ll post some of my first photos of the night sky with my new Canon Rebel T3i. First up… we had to get out of Toronto. Day 1: The first step was leaving at 6am to try and beat the Monday morning traffic rush out of Toronto, which is a...
How often does a star explode as a supernova in the Milky Way? With as many as 400 Billion stars, you would expect it to happen often But stars live a very long time, and most massive stars take anywhere from a few hundred million to a few billion years to reach maturity and explode. Putting all this together gives us a surprisingly human estimate. A supernova explodes in the Milky Way, on average, once every 50 years, or about once per human lifetime. We can still see remnants of great explosions that happened long ago, still expanding into the...
Welcome to a new series of posts that will characterize 1000 amazing facts about the Universe. There is so much out there that we have yet to learn, and every day, astronomers across the globe are using their research to reveal the deepest secrets of the cosmos. This series will look at the strangest, coolest, most exciting facts that we have discovered in hundreds of years of modern science. Fact #3: The Universe is made of a ridiculous amount of nothing. What is everything made of? The answer will change depending on how much education you have. For most of...
With the historic fly-by of Pluto last month, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft gave us an up-close look at the former 9th planet, showing that it is a dynamic world with icy plains, tall mountains, and an atmosphere. But now that New Horizons has passed by Pluto, it has the infinite cosmic horizon in its stead. So what’s next for the $700 Million spacecraft? Its battery will keep it going for a few more decades, and it will likely pass beyond the edge of the solar system, in the stead of the Voyager crafts. What else is ahead? The good news is...
I am always fascinated by the diversity of colours, shapes, and scenarios that pop up throughout our universe. Even though we can classify things into categories like ‘planetary nebula,’ ‘galaxy,’ ‘dwarf star,’ and such, there is still a huge amount of variability among these categories. The most diverse group may be nebulae, since their shape relies on what elements are present, the environment in which they formed, and how far along they are in their evolution. A great example of a strange and interesting nebula is the PN M2-9, the Twin Jet Nebula. Lying 5,560 light years away, in the...
