07 Dec, 2018

Friday night was a great one for comet peepers and conditions should only improve throughout the next week. Comet 46P/Wirtanen has reached naked-eye visibility from dark sites in the northern hemisphere. The short-period comet is approaching closer than usual to Earth, brightening by the night on its orbit, and should be  most easily seen on December 16, according to NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day. On December 16, the comet will be only 7.2 million miles away. It should be simple to find,

27 Nov, 2018

Around three dozen visitors were scattered throughout a University of Utah auditorium Monday witnessing first-hand one of NASA's greatest triumphs, the descent and landing of the InSight Mars probe. The program was hosted by the U.'s Department of Physics and Astronomy and its South Physics Observatory. Some sat with laptops or notebooks; some checked out displays about physics and space, which had been set up at the entrance and at the front of the auditorium; others stood chatting. The voice

17 Nov, 2018

The lovely open star cluster, the Pleiades, has been called the Seven Sisters since antiquity. But nobody sees seven stars in this showpiece of the late autumn and winter, not by unaided eyeball and certainly not by telescope. Like a tiny kite of bright points, in November the Pleiades are visible in the east after sunset and are easily seen until dawn. They lodge on the shoulder of the constellation Taurus the bull. Bruce McClure, in an article posted by EarthSky.org, says November is often

07 Nov, 2018

Enrico Fermi, the Nobel-winning nuclear physicist who was one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, arguably is best remembered for a lunchtime comment that has no connection to his specialty. In 1950, he and three other scientists were chatting about the possibility of advanced alien civilizations when he asked something like, "Where is everybody?" The question has come to be known as the Fermi Paradox, the most famous query about extraterrestrial civilizations, one that is recited and argued