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Seasons, short and simple
I love this question: Why is it warmer in the summer than in the winter (for the Northern hemisphere)? Go ahead and ask your friends. I suppose they will give one of the following likely answers: The...
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Parallax, what is it good for?
Very simply, parallax is an apparent motion of an object due to a change in observation position. Let me start with an example. Here are two photos. I took a picture of the cabinet in the background...
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A small version of the seasons
So, it snowed here (in Louisiana). Sure, it wasn’t a lot, but it was still a big deal. The following day, there was still some snow on the house roofs. I took some pictures. Here is a shot looking at...
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Scale Model of the Solar System
The solar system is difficult to show correctly. Why? It is difficult because the size of things are vastly different. Let me use units common in solar-system astronomy, the Astronomical Unit (or AU)....
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RP 7: Cool things the Greeks did in astronomy
One of things I like to think about in science is “how do we know that?” It is interesting how one thing builds on another. This is a story of how the Greeks estimated the distance from the Earth to...
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RP 9: Error propagation and the distance to the Sun
Some time ago, I wrote about the awesome things the Greeks did in astronomy. Basically they calculated the size of the Earth, distance and size of the moon and distance and size of the sun. The value...
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xkcd and Gravity Wells
Wow. In xkcd 681 comic, there is an impressive illustration of the common term “gravity well”. Here is a small part of that large image: I can’t resist. I must talk about this awesome illustration. My...
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Debris field for a broken meteor
I happened to catch two parts of two different episodes of Meteorite Men – a show about two guys that look for meteorites. In both of the snippets I saw, they were talking about a debris field for a...
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Ask a ScienceBlogger: Center of the Universe
I am going to try to answer another Ask a ScienceBlogger question. This one is from George P. Burdell. He asks: “If the universe is expanding from the big bang, has anyone tried to reverse plot the...
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When is noon?
I was at the zoo this weekend, it was fun but hot. Somewhere near the middle, there was a sun dial. The cool thing (well, I think sun dials are cool anyway) was that the shadow was pointing about to...
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