Skywise Unlimited

What is the nature of interstellar dust? How does it affect the starlight that passes through it? What can be done to locate and catalog the numerous, small, tenuous dust clouds that populate our galaxy at the higher latitudes? Is it possible to somehow vacuum under my refrigerator without moving the damn thing? The nature […]

“The drum in a dream pounds loud to the dreamer.” ~ Carl Sandburg Anisotropy: This term is frequently used to describe the temperature fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. The word means not uniform, or not the same. Like if you dressed a calico cat with a plaid kilt then filled it with dark energy […]

One whole year ago my fellow NASA tweeps and I were at JPL in Pasadena listening to Allen Chen give us live play by play updates as Curiosity descended to the Martian surface and the famous seven minutes of terrible possibilities unfolded. Even Neil deGrasse Tyson has since admitted he had severe doubts about the […]

A Particle Man’s Lifeis Always Intense How can a pair of tiny particles remain connected, remain related, and perfectly responsive to each other, in spite of being separated beyond their ability to communicate at subluminal speeds? It’s as if a pair of twins are born but are never truly separate beings. They remain in some […]

Scientists Are Cracking the Primordial Soup Mystery | Motherboard.

I think Isaac would appreciate my continuing struggle against the ridiculous notion that every scientific theory is eventually discarded. The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov (1988) I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to […]

Euphoric Trepidation I kept checking the clock because it felt like 10:30 was barreling down on us like a freight train. Spacecraft launches can often be delayed but this landing was mostly being coordinated by Isaac Newton. He tends to keep to the schedule. I kept imagining the sky crane with Curiosity tucked away inside, […]

Celebration Internet rumors had been flying around before we tweeps even arrived in Pasadena for the Curiosity Rover landing that “surprises” were in store for us. Somehow we all intuitively knew that this meant a celebrity or two would be stopping by. The two names that I remember being passed around the rumor mill most […]

To My Tweeps I have a message to those thousands of space geeks who wanted to go to the JPL Mars landing tweet-up, to those who wound up on the waiting list hoping for an opening, and especially to those rogues who showed up anyway and tweeted the event from off-campus. I sympathize with you […]

The Ultimate Tweet-up When NASA tweeted about the JPL social I didn’t even really understand what it meant. I clicked on the link and it became apparent that a rare opportunity was being presented for a handful of people to spend a few days touring JPL and to be on site at the facility during […]

Published: Thu, 07/19/2012 Matthew Anderson WESTERN TODAY EDITOR Brad Snowder, manager of the Western Washington University Planetarium and lecturer in Western’s physics and astronomy department, has been selected by NASA to join a team of 25 social networking mission specialists working to create buzz about the landing of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover on […]

Bad Brad’s Big Blog Theory Suddenly, there was a huge cacophonous sound. The event was actually unimaginably tiny, and there was probably nothing quite like sound yet, but FINALLY, after who knows how long, time itself was invented. At long last, with the appearance of sensible chronologies, event could follow event, and shit happened. At […]