Light is beautiful. It illuminates a world of beauty for us to appreciate while giving us a tool to decipher the riddles of the universe. In astronomy, it’s always about more photons! Because more photons = more data = better results. But in an increasingly technological world, more photons can be a bad thing. Especially when the artificial photons overpower the natural. I was lucky to spend most of my youth living away from the bright lights of the city, but with the sprawling metropolis of Toronto to the South, I could always see the orange glow that blocked out...
Is this a giant hole in space? I show a picture similar to this as I ask this question to students and audiences that I host in my planetarium. Most people answer that it is a black hole, or dark matter, or dark energy, or something strange like that. But the amazing thing is that it is actually a thick cloud of dust that is opaque, letting no visible light from the distant stars pass through. The funny thing is that the cloud is transparent in infrared light, but in the visible spectrum it highlights something interesting about the universe:...
As warm as the temperatures have been recently, it may shock you to learn that today marks the Earth’s Aphelion, or its greatest distance from the Sun in its orbit. This may confuse those that think the Earth has seasons due to its proximity to the Sun. The seasons of Earth are actually due to the tilt of the Earth’s axis, and is a result of how much direct sunlight we receive at any given time of year. It’s one of my favourite trivia questions to ask kids in my planetarium shows, and have them guess when the Earth is...
When I do a planetarium show for an audience, and they see the night sky for the first time, I always ask them ‘What do you see?’ The response is the usual stuff – Stars, the Moon, maybe planets, or the Milky Way. But they seem to be missing the most important and largest part of the sky – the Darkness. Space itself. Stars light up the cosmos, but if there were no stars, would we think that the universe was empty? Perhaps, but if you can imagine this scenario, it gives you an important perspective when you want to...
When I do Planetarium shows, one of the things I like to talk about during the Milky Way – Andromeda collision that will happen in 70 Mlllion years, is the fact that very few stars will actually hit each other. Yet we still call it a ‘Galaxy collision.’ One of the questions I always get is “Will the Earth survive this?” I usually ask the audience. The response is usually a unanimous ‘No way!” And then I tell them how big Galaxies are and they can’t believe how unlikely it is that the solar system will be affected. Consider the...
