Set your clocks back one hour tonight before going to bed . . . just what we needed, one more hour of anxiety. This year, Halloween will feature the second full moon of the month, also known as the Hunter’s Moon. According to NASA: Since the harvesters had reaped the fields, hunters could easily see …
(11.26) And some fun news from Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. First, the NASA Mars Insight Mission is on target for a landing at 3pm on Monday, and you can share the excitement. Not only does the website have a countdown clock, but a ‘Distance to Mars’ countdown meter that will ultimately …
(3.18) Join industrial designer and RISD educator, Michael Lye, for “Design for Extreme Environments” at the Athenaeum’s Friday Salon. Lye teaches advanced studios and seminars at the graduate and undergraduate levels and serves as Senior Critic and NASA Coordinator, specializing in human-centered design with an emphasis on design research and analysis. (We are talking about Mars, right?) …
Head over to the Providence Children’s Museum for the opening reception of ‘My Sky’ a traveling exhibit produced by the Boston Children’s Museum in collaboration with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and NASA. Gaze through a telescope to see stars and planets in their real-time positions in the sky. Explore the phases of the moon by …
(12.28) This is a gravity map of the moon from the NASA ‘Image of the day’ gallery, an example of the science I’m always going on about. This image shows the variations in the lunar gravity field as measured by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) during the primary mapping mission from March to …
As the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity gets set to land early Monday morning, Ralph Milliken, assistant professor of geological sciences, will be getting ready to work. He’s a member of the mission’s science team, and his curiosity lies in finding out why Mars is a colder, drier place than it used to be. Curiosity …
In anticipation of the big day on June 5th, the Providence Athenaeum has organized a tutorial of sorts for this coming Tuesday, May 29th — From Transit Street to the Stars: the Transit of Venus in 1769 and Today. In June 1769 a cannon fired, a telescope was pointed at the sun, and a group …
Look up and to the east tonight at sunset and prepare to be stupefied. According to NASA, Okay, the Moon is 14% bigger than usual, but can you really tell the difference? It’s tricky. There are no rulers floating in the sky to measure lunar diameters. Hanging high overhead with no reference points to provide …
In an NBC Evening News report on an image from Mars featuring the (possible) meteorite NASA has dubbed ‘Block Island’, Brian Williams compared the look of the scene to “one of those beautiful Rhode Island beaches”, whereas the scientists had meant nothing of the sort but merely thought it looked like a block. (Mars picture …
From NASA’a always awesome image of the day feature.