The Sun is Doing That Weird Thing Again

You know the thing I mean, when it suddenly goes dark in the middle of the day and looks all fiery.  Stars come out in the daytime and animals go crazy.  When silly people pray extra hard for some reason.  I swear the Moon is involved. It looks like this…. Ah yes the solar eclipse, the rare event that only occurs because the Sun is both 400 times wider and 400 times more distant than the Moon.  It’s a mathematically beautiful event that only occurs every 5 years on average.  And when it does happen, the total coverage of the...

New Life in Space

Humans have lived in Space. And so have fruit flies, mice, monkeys, chimpanzees, guinea pigs, rabbits, frogs, reptiles, and a variety of plants.  Now we can add a new life form to this list: Flowers.  The first ever space flower was revealed recently, and it’s a yellow Zinnia. Scott Kelly has been aboard the International space Station (ISS) for over 300 days.  It’s not an easy job, being away from loved ones, nature, and the rest of humanity, locked up with at most five other humans in a tin can that experiences a sunrise every 45 minutes.  It messes with...

The Expanse of Time – Galaxies, Evolution, Lifetimes

Have you ever seen those amazing composite images that people will post, showing the same picture every day or every year for a long period of time.  We see how children age, how people transform their bodies, and how their day to day experiences, though seemingly small, add up to incredible changes as the years go by.  I personally love time-lapse photography, representing a long period of time in a shorter instance.  For me the beauty is showing those changes that are subtle in human experience and communicating them in a way that shows how significant they are when we...