Category Archives: Historical

Solstices & Spirituality

Posted on January 26, 2016 by lindseynestor

  As we’ve learned through our assignments and reading, the spring and fall equinoxes are the times when the Sun appears to cross the equator, causing daytime to be the same length at almost all latitudes. These two days, in addition to the winter and summer solstices, held high significance in ancient spirituality. The adoration […] Continue reading →

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Solstices & Spirituality

Posted on January 26, 2016 by lindseynestor

  As we’ve learned through our assignments and reading, the spring and fall equinoxes are the times when the Sun appears to cross the equator, causing daytime to be the same length at almost all latitudes. These two days, in addition to the winter and summer solstices, held high significance in ancient spirituality. The adoration […] Continue reading →

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Human’s Fascination of the Solstices

Posted on January 26, 2016 by 2016spaceodyssey

If there was one thing that early humans revered most, it may have been the position of the Sun.  Ancient cultures around the world, before the first cities ever existed, built monuments to measure the Sun’s position (known as archaeoastronomy).  The most famous of which is Stonehenge in England, which has its entrances aligned to […] Continue reading →

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The Cosmic Calendar

Posted on January 26, 2016 by nedastro2110

For my first blog, I wanted to discuss the Cosmic Calendar. Often times in our life we think of our lifespans as quite long. Especially when compared to our ancestors of a few hundreds to thousands of years ago, we are long surpassing their lifespans. However, compared to the lifespan of the universe, we are […] Continue reading →

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The Cosmic Calendar

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Sofia

We, as humans, can have difficulty understanding amounts that exceed our narrow perspective. To aid us in understanding the 14 billion years that the universe has existed and the minuscule amount of time humans have inhabited it, scientists have put it in our terms of one year. Each month of the “cosmic calendar” represents roughly 1 … Continue reading “The Cosmic Calendar” Continue reading →

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Cosmic Calendar: The Month of January

Posted on January 24, 2016 by andyastronomer

After studying the Cosmic Calendar, very little appears to have happened in “the first month of the universe.” Aside from the Big Bang in January and the formation of the Milky Way in March, most of the action begins in September, reaching a climax in December. Of course, the notion that little happened in the […] Continue reading →

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Name That Constellation

Posted on January 24, 2016 by Chloe

The Night Sky, showing the Milky Way, at La Silla Observatory in Chile. Source: Wikimedia Commons.   The constellations visible from the Western Hemisphere differ from those visible from the Southern Hemisphere. In English, we typically use names derived from Greek and Roman mythology for the constellations, referring to constellations such as Orion and Pleiades […] Continue reading →

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Constellations of the East

Posted on January 23, 2016 by jasperluastronomy

When we were looking at star maps inside of Stellarium during class, I couldn’t help but think about how arbitrary all of the constellations seemed. If I didn’t know what shape to look for, I don’t think I would ever have found the same patterns in the sky. I decided to study the Chinese constellation system […] Continue reading →

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Aut viam

Posted on January 20, 2016 by d51blog

“Aut viam inveniam aut faciam” “I will either find a way or I will make one” – Hannibal Barca, before crossing the Alps with his army Continue reading →

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The Cosmic Calendar

Posted on January 20, 2016 by alecsolarsystem

The Cosmic Calendar is truly an eye-opening visualization of the entire age of our universe. It shrinks the entire 13.8 billion years that the universe has been around into one calendar year where each second equates to a few hundred years. The birth of the human species and just how little we have been around compared […] Continue reading →

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