Category: Astronomy

Carrying the torch from Apollo, through shuttle and station, to a hoped-for new era of space exploration, the Artemis 2 lunar flyby exceeded expectations All last week, I monitored the NASA mission coverage livestream. As the crew approached the Moon (Luna), it waned from gibbous to half to crescent in just a few hours, as…

As a child of the Apollo program and a lifelong dreamer of spaceflight, I am thrilled to follow the Artemis 2 mission, carrying the first humans around the Moon (Luna) in over half a century, with the intent to pick up where we left off, establish a permanent lunar presence, and proceed to Mars and…

Last night’s lunar eclipse, as seen from Earth, looked like a solar eclipse, as seen from Luna. Firefly Aerospace‘s NASA-funded Blue Ghost lunar lander recently became the first commercial spacecraft to successfully land on Earth’s moon Luna. Blue Ghost’s mission is designed to last a single lunar day, about two terrestrial weeks. Last night it…

From my teens to my twenties, from junior high school to graduate school to young professor, I excitingly followed the first reconnaissance of the outer solar system by the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft. But the exploration isn’t over. For the last decade, the Hubble Space Telescope has been systematically observing the colors and dynamics of…

When viewing space photography, such as Apollo or International Space Station photos, people often ask, “Where are the stars?” Typically such photos properly expose the bright lunar or space station surfaces and consequently underexpose the dim background stars, rendering space as featureless black. Current ISS astronaut Matthew Dominick has been experimenting with photography, and his…