Tag Archives: technology

Star Walk: Planetarium in Your Pocket

Posted on January 25, 2014 by hollyreichert

When looking up into the sky at night, usually I can’t identify all the constellations above.  The Star Walk app knows where you are and tells you what stars and planets are above you.  You can hold it up wherever you are and it is like having a mobile planetarium.  Even in the city where […] Continue reading →

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New Discoveries: The New Age of Astronomy

Posted on April 29, 2013 by werdercj

This picture compares the inner planets of our solar system to Kepler-62, a newly discovered planetary system NASA’s Kepler mission has recently discovered three super-Earth-size planets in the “habitable zone,” or the range of distances form a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might sustain liquid water.  It is planets like these […] Continue reading →

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Impacts on Saturn and the Drake equation

Posted on April 29, 2013 by werdercj

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft recently observed meteors colliding with Saturn’s thin rings.  This marked the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn’s rings, although astronomers already expected this to be occurring regularly.  However, specific details of such impacts were merely speculation, much of which is cleared up via […] Continue reading →

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A Grim Future, Brightened by the Stars

Posted on April 29, 2013 by burnspress

For my culminating post, I want to reflect on how my perspective on space and the future of astronomy has changed over the course of Astronomy 201. Firstly, everything I learned in this course, from gravity and planetary formation to stars and habitable zones, has given me a fundamental and scientifically realistic understanding of space […] Continue reading →

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The Golden Record

Posted on April 29, 2013 by mirandaskunz

In the early 1970s, plaques containing information about humans and Earth were sent out on plaques on the Pioneer spacecraft. By the late 1970s, these plaques were upgraded to golden records on the Voyager probes. These phonographic records, designed to inform aliens who might discover the probes about humans, included 115 images, greetings in 55 […] Continue reading →

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Voyager 1

Posted on April 28, 2013 by juliettealper

Voyager 1 launched in 1977 in order to collect data and research the outer planets of our solar system. Currently, 11.5 billion miles from Earth, scientists are having some difficulty determining when exactly the Voyager is going to leave the solar system. It has completed its mission of surveying the outer planets, such as Saturn, […] Continue reading →

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The Perks of Infinity

Posted on April 28, 2013 by ibrahim2016

The good thing about the universe is that there a lot of things. It has got something for everybody. Take a look at these artworks: What I ultimately learned from this course was that, somewhere out there, these places have to exist. They better do. Image and Image and Image and Image and Image and […] Continue reading →

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Benfits of Astronomy on Earth

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Will K

            Astronomical research does not just benefit the limited field of astronomy; rather it serves to improve many other fields of study. From the first missions into orbit to current research of interstellar travel, astronomy has benefited our standard of living here on Earth. Many people have heard that memory foam was invented by […] Continue reading →

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Holes and Wrinkles

Posted on April 28, 2013 by ibrahim2016

There is a lot of misconception about two of the more arcane forms of proposed space travel: Warp Drives and Worm Holes. They work on the same principles but function in wholly different ways. General Relativity explains that any mass or energy can bend space and time. Since there is energy everywhere space and time […] Continue reading →

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Interstellar Propulsion

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Will K

               There is no better way to learn about space then to actually go there. We can only discover so much from far off images and spectrometry techniques. This is why organizations like NASA and DARPA are trying to develop new methods of space travel to send us to other stars. There are a […] Continue reading →

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