Did I ever tell you about the time I prevented a bombing? Okay forget I said anything, but here’s what happened. On July 11, 1991 in La Paz, Mexico there was a total eclipse of the Sun. The Keystone Astronomers were there. Keystone Astronomers at Large is a quirky cable access TV show that I […]
June 30, 2013
Lyra, Aquila, Cygnus, and Sagitta Respectively they are The Harp, The Eagle, The Swan, and The Itty Bitty Arrow. The first three are all birds being shot at with the arrow. Well, two birds and a musical instrument, but the harp used to be a pigeon. Hey, it was a simpler time. Meanwhile the brightest […]
June 23, 2013
Big Dipper The most famous of all the dots ever connected. So well-known that people pretend to see it even when they don’t. There are seven stars, eight if you count correctly. One of them is tiny, little, and wee, and is attempting to hide behind the handle. America calls it the dipper, which is […]
June 16, 2013
Capricornus the Seagoat The name Capricornus has been shortened to Carpricorn by some folks. But that is a very recent thing, like only in the last hundred years maybe. Either way, it means Seagoat. And Seagoat is the oldest known name still in use for anything in the whole sky. People have been calling these […]
June 9, 2013
Scorpius the Scorpion In the scorpion we find lots of bright stars that make an obvious fish hook shape, especially when you ignore the claws that the Romans surgically shortened in order to make Libra. In fact some natives of the south pacific call this constellation “Maui’s Hook.” You see Maui is one of the […]
June 2, 2013
Leo the Lion The big kitty is one of the few real connect-the-dots sort of allegories. It makes a reasonable stick figure of an animal at least. The Chinese call it the horse. It takes some imagination. If you try to connect the dots you may get something that looks like a coat hanger after […]
May 26, 2013
Taurus the Bull Taurus is a bull, well half of a bull anyway. The front half. Actually mostly the head, with a shiny red eye. I think he’s been drinking. He’s charging Orion who appears to be perfectly prepared to defend himself from the assault. Orion also appears to have lost his pants but we […]
May 19, 2013
The beaten path that the Sun appears to trod on its yearly trek among the stars is the oldest known method of mapping our way around the sky. So the Sun was the center of celestial attention even before people promoted it to admin of the solar system. That makes a lot of sense to […]
May 12, 2013
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 […]
May 5, 2013
Shatter not the darkness at the site of observing. Man-made lights thou shalt eschew, save the faint of red. Thou shalt not illuminate thy headlights of thy automobile, nor the car door shalt thy open before the disconnecting of thy dome light. Even a match strucketh in haste is mightily unpleasing in the dark-adapted eyes […]
April 28, 2013
John was a geek. No one doubted that. He liked three things; math, physics, and math. He spent hours every day at his little desk, drawing circles and triangles and weirdly nested multi-faceted polyhedrons, and he played around with the associated mathematical formulae. He made pretty good money these days at least, even though almost […]
April 21, 2013
There is a hero. Everyone loves him because he is charitable and people’s lives tend to flourish under his watchful eye. But there is a nemesis, a huge and hideous reptile, the largest ever seen, who rises slowly from beneath the Earth bringing death and darkness and fear in his wake. The hero goes down […]
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. And so it begins.
Skywise Unlimited 
July 14, 2013
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