Author Archives: Alex Pratte

Propulsion Methods for Space Travel

Posted on April 26, 2016 by Alex Pratte

One of the biggest problems that we have when it comes to interstellar travel is that we don’t have a spaceship that can go fast enough to get us where we want to go in a reasonable time. Luckily, we have some really smart scientists trying to come up with ways to make a really […] Continue reading →

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Fun Facts about Titan

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Alex Pratte

Out of all the moons in our solar system, my favorite one would have to be Titan. Titan is the second largest moon in our solar system, second only to that fat piece of lard Ganymede. However, Titan, has something that Ganymede doesn’t and that is an “earth like cycle of liquids flowing across its […] Continue reading →

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Comets and stuff

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Alex Pratte

For blog 7 I’ve decided to write about comets. Comets, according to space.com is “an icy body that releases gas or dust”(space.com) Astronomers believe that comets are leftovers of the gas, dust, ice, and rocks that originally formed our solar system. It is believed that comets carried some of the water and organic molecules that […] Continue reading →

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The Largest Things in the Universe

Posted on March 15, 2016 by Alex Pratte

    While I was looking up random astronomy stuff, I came across an article that lists the top ten biggest things in the universe. Here are a few of the gigantic things that made the list: Biggest Star – VY Canis Majoris VY Canis Majoris is the largest star that we know of; it has […] Continue reading →

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Atmosphere of Mars

Posted on March 15, 2016 by Alex Pratte

  For my 5th blog post, I decided to write about what the atmosphere of Mars is like. All the information I write about can be found in this link. According to Space.com, Mars’ atmosphere is about 100 times thinner than Earth’s atmosphere and is pretty much all carbon dioxide. There are some other elements […] Continue reading →

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Shout-out to all the Astronomy Ladies

Posted on February 16, 2016 by Alex Pratte

In a lot of professions today it seems like the ladies are under appreciated, so for my fourth blog I thought it would be nice to give some credit to a couple of smart lady astronomers that paved the way for women in the sciences. As I learned in a really cool BBC article that […] Continue reading →

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Using the Stars to Navigate

Posted on February 16, 2016 by Alex Pratte

c For my third blog, I came across a mental floss article giving some helpful tips on how to navigate at night by looking at the stars. As we all know people have been using the stars to navigate from place to place for really long time, so it seems like something pretty handy to […] Continue reading →

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Creative Title For HW6

Posted on February 8, 2016 by Alex Pratte

In 1609 Galileo, improved on the current design of the telescope and used it to make many astronomical discoveries including sunspots, the phases of Venus, and the four largest moons of Jupiter. He was also a supporter of the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the sun. This eventually led to him to being […] Continue reading →

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Mayans Predicted the 1991 Solar Eclipse

Posted on January 26, 2016 by Alex Pratte

Okay so this picture may look like just a bunch of doodles on a piece of clay, but it actually is hieroglyphs from four ancient Mayan codices that predict with surprising accuracy the 1991 Solar Eclipse. The Mayan astronomers were able to predict within a day, the time of the 1991 solar eclipse. Keep in […] Continue reading →

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Speed of Light Slowing Down???

Posted on January 26, 2016 by Alex Pratte

So we’ve all heard of Einstein’s theory of relativity which states that the speed of light is constant and all that good stuff. Well, apparently a couple of Australian scientists have found evidence that points to the possibility that the speed of light is not actually constant and has been slowing down since the Big […] Continue reading →

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