Topic: Pamela Gay
New Horizons 10 Years Later

New Horizons 10 Years Later

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the New Horizons spacecraft making its historic flyby of Pluto. The mission is still healthy and still being used for science and has recently demonstrated that astral navigation is possible, even from inside our solar system. From it’s location in the Kuiper Belt, it has been able to measure shifts in the observed locations of nearby stars compared to background objects, and researchers could use those shifts to calculate the missions position. While it’s way easier to use techniques like measure light travel times and such, it’s cool to know the...

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Get Thee Outside! The Perseids Are Coming!

Get Thee Outside! The Perseids Are Coming!

The Perseids are best viewed on August 12 and 13 but can be seen from now through August 24 as the Earth passes through debris left behind by comet Swift-Tuttle. Overlapping with the bright Perseids is the Southern Delta Aquarid meteor shower, which peak on July 30...

Betelgeuse’s Betelbuddy

Betelgeuse’s Betelbuddy

Last December a paper in the Astronomical Journal led by Morgan MacLeod used decades of data we have on Betelgeuse’s changing brightness to predict that the star has a low mass companion, possibly still in the process of forming, that orbits it every 5.775 years. As...

Comets Escape and Comets Visit

Comets Escape and Comets Visit

Growing up, I remember learning that comets could have elliptical, parabolic, or hyperbolic orbits. At the time, this was all about learning conic sections, and ellipticity of orbits, and it never really occurred to me that all those comets on escape orbits had to go...

Distant Worlds Were Flung as Youth

Distant Worlds Were Flung as Youth

Image credit: NASA One of the things that continues to amaze me is how much we still have to learn about solar system formation. Understanding how our universe seeded solar systems in so much variety is work it will take generations to fully understand, but we are...

Mapping the Solar System

Mapping the Solar System

Here in the inner solar system, we live in the land of rocky objects and cratered planets. While the largest concentration of rocky objects are gathered up in the Asteroid Belt, the entire inner solar system has swarming rocky objects of various sizes. At the most...

Welcome, Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS!

Welcome, Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS!

Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS I want to call your attention to an assuming moving dot. Catalogued as 3I/ATLAS, this high speed dot is moving at more than the escape velocity of our Solar System as it comes crashing through on its journey through the Milky Way. This dot...

A Brief History of Community Science, Part 2

A Brief History of Community Science, Part 2

The landing page for a new community science platform. Join us at mappers.psi.edu! Back in the spring of 1999, while one part of the internet focused in on still unpatched Y2K bugs, another, often overlapping part of the internet focused in on something much more fun...

A Brief History of Community Science, Part 1

A Brief History of Community Science, Part 1

Across the centuries, people of all kinds have contributed to the field we now call science. From early developments in mathematics, to systematic observations of how objects move in the sky, and changes take place in the landscape, we’ve seen people systematically...

Starship: Dreaming of Mars, struggling for LEO

Starship: Dreaming of Mars, struggling for LEO

I think it is fair to say that humans have dreamed of going to Mars for as long as we have known that Mars is a planet. We see these dreams in amazing books, like The Martian Chronicles and John Carter of Mars, and even in Percival Lowell’s attempts to map what we now...