Skywise Unlimited

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]