tags: astronomy
2003
September
- 2003 Sep 23
- galileo and the last day of summer
The Galileo space probe meets its end in the atmosphere of Jupiter. The [last day of summer][x1] always leaves me [cold][x2] [x1]: /2001/09/22/the-last-day-of-summer “The Last Day of Summer • 2001 Sep 22 • Foobar” [x2]: /2001/09/30/last-days “Last Days • 2001 Sep 30 • Foobar”
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2007
August
- 2007 Aug 27
- total eclipse of the heart
For some strange reason, I wake up at 1:45 a.m. My eyes are gooey and difficult to open because I fell asleep with my contacts in. I gaze outside my windowsill, and there's the full moon gleaming down upon me, and I remember that today, there's supposed to be a lunar eclipse.
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2008
February
August
- 2008 Aug 12
- completely insane
So I was this close to getting to sleep at a reasonable hour last night, but then I heard that the Perseid meteor shower was supposed to peak the evening of Aug 11/early morning of Aug 12. I tried to think of the darkest place within a reasonable distance. The Anza-Borrego Desert came to mind, but that was a good two hour drive into the middle of nowhere, so I figured driving through the Temecula Valley on the way to L.A. would suffice.
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2016
January
- 2016 Jan 20
- Planet X
The guy who demoted Pluto from major planet status to dwarf planet status believes that there is an actual Planet X with 10x the mass of Earth lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system.
· Read more… - 2016 Jan 21
- Super Earth
I was unaware that "super-earth" has a specific (although still informal) definition, roughly, a planet with a mass greater than Earth but less than a gas giant in the Sol system (i.e., less massive than Uranus or Neptune).
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February
- 2016 Feb 19
- Nicolaus Copernicus
The irony is that Copernicus set forth his model of heliocentrism without any empirical evidence whatsoever, and his model was less accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model in making predictions of planetary positions and he got the shape of orbits wrong (he thought they were circular and they're actually very slightly elliptical).
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