I love being a science communicator, being with people and sharing my knowledge of the universe. However, I have a personal fascination with the universe, and although this helps me learn more and ultimately makes me a better communicator, there is something nice about connecting with the stars in a traditional way, ie with a telescope. Every year, usually in Summer (a short season in Canada), I venture to a dark sky location and get in some observing, to remind me of the real universe that’s out there. Since I also love the visualization of space as a communication tool,...
It’s an amazing time to look up to the night sky! For the first time in nearly 6700 years, comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE has made it’s return to the inner solar system. These small, icy, dirty clumps remain dim and dark through over 90% of their journey from the distant reaches of the Solar System, but once they close in on the immense heat of our nearest star, things change. Comet C/2020 F3 NEOWISE captured by the Parker Solar Probe as it swings around the Sun. Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Lab/Parker Solar Probe/Brendan Gallagher The ice melts, pockets of...
It’s been a busy few weeks on Mars, with the InSight Lander arriving in late November, making it the newest member of the Martian robotic ground team. The science hasn’t started yet, but the first photos of the landing area have come back, and testing of the science instruments has begun, with the first big reveal coming late last week – the first recording of Martian wind. Landed Martian robots can be found all over Mars. Note that most are no longer operational. Credit: NASA InSight provided the first landing on Mars since Curiosity in 2013. It went through the...
I love working on different projects every day. Some days I present planetarium shows, some days I do a radio show, some days I’m doing video conference calls with school children, and some days I’m on TV commenting on recent space news. I enjoy the variety that being a science communicator offers. In that spirit, I want to introduce a project I’ve been working on for the past year, a podcast called “The Expanding Universe.” Together with my good friend Jesse Rogerson (@JesseRogerson), a fellow astronomer and science communicator, we have been recording an episode every two weeks on...
I’m going to come right out and ask the burning question: Is Pluto a Planet? No. At least under the current definition. So the question becomes “Should Pluto be a planet?” That answer is a bit more complicated. Let’s look at the history. Discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, Pluto was initially considered the ninth planet of our Solar System. It was part of an intense search that follows back all the way to the discovery of Uranus and the orbital calculations that led to the discovery of Neptune. Even after Neptune’s discovery, gravitational perturbations pointed to a ninth planet,...
I really enjoy looking at images of the Sun from one of the several round-the-clock monitoring systems. It’s fascinating that the public can get access to almost real time images of the Sun and see what’s going on in several wavelengths. I’ve always hoped to see what other stars look like in the future, and today, that future is one step closer. Here’s a brand new picture of another star! This is a real image of distant star π1Gruis, a star 350 times as massive as the Sun, in the southern hemisphere constellation Grus. The star is 530 light years...
On the golden record that accompanies the Voyager spacecraft, there is a map showing the location of Earth. It’s not a road map that you might pull out when navigating a city, but a 3D map showing the location of a star, the Sun, in a populous galaxy. But just how would this map work? And more importantly, what are the map markers? If you notice the lines at the bottom left of the golden record image, they all intersect at a common center point. This is the Sun, and the lines extend out showing relative distances to the nearest...
Moments ago, NASA announced that the Kepler space telescope, for the first time ever, has discovered a star that has a system of 8 planets, similar to our own solar system. The exceptional part of the discovery is that it was found in existing Kepler data, using google artificial intelligence software that was trained to find positive detections in over 30,000 data sets. Known as a neural network, the software was trained to look for patterns in the intensity of light from stars. Normally, humans would need to do this work, but with so much data, there simply wasn’t enough...
The year is 1987, and on February 23rd, three separate neutrino observatories experienced a huge burst in detections. Although initially unsure of their origin, the next day a Supernova was discovered in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way visible in the southern hemisphere. Known as 1987A, it was the closest supernova observed in centuries, and was observed by astronomers around the world as it brightened and then slowly dimmed. By combining the visible observations with the neutrino data, scientists learned about how supernovae occur, constrained the mass of the neutrino, and opened a new...
Although the August 21st eclipse happened about 6 weeks ago, I realized it would take me a long time to edit all the photos I took during my trip. I had over 2000 individual shots of the eclipse alone, taking a single (1/4000 s) shot every 10 seconds, at ISO 100, with my telescope coming out at around f/6. I’ve done a lot of time-lapse photography before, so I thought it would be a routine shot, but I was wrong. Eclipses are much tougher to edit in terms of a time-lapse. But first, the end result of my 10 hours...
