Category Archives: Historical

Stars of Revelation

Throughout the Bible, celestial bodies are mentioned. Jesus is “The Morning Star.” Abraham would have as many offspring as stars in the sky. Another example many people are familiar is the Book of Revelation in the Bible. It was also mentioned in my discussion of the tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In Chapter 12, […] Continue reading

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Variable Stars and change in the Night Sky

Image of Omicron Ceti (Mira) Source: Digitized Sky Survey 2 Looking up at the night sky it may seem that while the stars do move around, they remain the same brightness all year round. This was a common belief pushed by philosophers like Aristotle, believing that stars are eternal and invariable. However in 1638 Johannes […] Continue reading

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The Drake Equation

The idea of life on other planets has always been a hot topic. An entire genre has been developed to showcase aliens stemming from human imagination. This is usually pseudoscience, but it does beg the question: are aliens real? While we have never contacted or found evidence of other civilizations, there is a way to […] Continue reading

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Blog #5: Pluto

The above photo was captured by the New Horizons Spacecraft and enhanced by NASA in 2015. Pluto is classified as a dwarf planet and is located in the Kuiper Belt in the far reaches of the Solar System. The average surface temperature on Pluto is around -233°C. This is because Pluto receives very little sunlight […] Continue reading

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Interferometry: Viewing the Minute

Saying the universe is incomprehensibly massive, so much so only the brightest and closest objects and phenomena are visible to the naked eye. Throughout history people have had work arounds, be it using devices to mark inclination of stars to focusing light through telescopes to make the faintest bodies visible. One of the most interesting […] Continue reading

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Did we really land on the Moon?

July 20th, 1969. We landed on the moon. But did we really? There are many conspiracies on if we really landed on the moon or not. People claim many reasons which prove that the moon landing never actually occurred. Shadows in the moon landing photos are not parallel which shows that they were fake. The […] Continue reading

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Halley’s Comet

I used measurements from Halley’s Comet for the impact homework, so I wanted to learn more about it. It certainly has name recognition, but I wanted to learn more about it. I found some great information from NASA that I figured I would share. Halley’s Comet is named after an astronomer by the name of […] Continue reading

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The Kuiper Belt: Exploring New Horizons

Hello (again), and welcome (back) to my Astronomy Blog! Today’s post is about the Kuiper Belt and its objects.  What is the Kuiper Belt?  The Kuiper (Kai-per) Belt is a donut-shaped region beyond the orbit of Neptune. Within the Kuiper Belt, it is estimated that millions of icy objects (or even trillions of these objects, […] Continue reading

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The Planets Inspiring Art

Planets have always been a large source of inspiration for classical music composers, and there is probably no larger example than Gustav Holst’s Planets Suite. This work’s popularity has also reached the masses, and his music is known to have significantly influenced John Williams in his compositions for his film scores. What I find interesting […] Continue reading

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Tycho’s Supernova Shifting World Views

Tycho Brahe, quite a prominent astronomer in the 16th century, is one of the most well known individuals to have sighted a new light filling the night sky. This strange appearance is now known as SN-1572 or more colloquially Tycho’s Supernova, and is revolutionary towards how we view the night sky. Historically speaking, this change […] Continue reading

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