Image of the Big Dipper

Ursa Major • Image by Michal Kryński from Pixabay

Science and reality

For the past cou­ple of months I have had a New York­er cov­er tacked on the wall above my desk. The draw­ing on the cov­er, by Eugène Mihaesco, is sim­ple. A pen lays on a white table, its nib dark with ink. An ink bot­tle stands open. The ink in the bot­tle is a map of con­stel­la­tions of the north­ern sky — Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and Dra­co — includ­ing the stars Dub­he, Mer­ak, and Mizar.

Image of the moon rising over hill

Photo by Joel Miller on Unsplash

Image of the milky way at night

Photo by Paige Weber on Unsplash

For so many, the starry night is gone

Labor Day — tra­di­tion­al­ly the end of sum­mer vaca­tion. We are back from the moun­tains, the seashore, or sail­ing boats at sea, places where the sky is still inky dark and free of urban haze. Places where we had a chance to see the night sky as our grand­par­ents saw it, in the days before elec­tric lights and indus­tri­al pol­lu­tion oblit­er­at­ed the stars.

Image of bootprint on surface of the moon

Humanity's mark on the moon • NASA / Buzz Aldrin (Public Domain)

Artist's impression of SN 1987A

Artist's impression of supernova remnant SN 1987A • ESO/L. Calçada (CC BY 3.0)

Image of the surface of Mars

Are we alone? • NASA/JPL/Cornell

Image of supernova remnant

Remnant of Kepler's Supernova (SN 1604) • NASA/ESA/JHU/R.Sankrit & W.Blair (Public Domain)

Image of the Hubble Space Telescope being deployed in space

The Hubble Space Telescope being deployed in 1990 • NASA/IMAX (Public Domain)

The tales told by starlight

One year ago this week [in Jan­u­ary 1986], the Space Shut­tle Chal­lenger explod­ed short­ly after take­off, tak­ing sev­en astro­nauts to a fiery death. Eval­u­a­tion of the acci­dent and redesign of the shut­tle and boost­er rock­ets has inter­rupt­ed the launch sched­ule for at least two years. For astronomers, the ground­ed shut­tle has meant a frus­trat­ing delay in deploy­ment of the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope, one of the most remark­able instru­ments in the his­to­ry of sci­ence, and one that has the poten­tial to rev­o­lu­tion­ize our knowl­edge of the universe.

Painting of Galileo demonstrating his telescope

Galileo demonstrating his telescope

Image of space launch

A commercial space launch • Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash

Orbiting cemetery

Deke Slay­ton made it into the his­to­ry books by being one of the sev­en orig­i­nal astro­nauts — the guys with the “right stuff.” He made his­to­ry again by being present when an Apol­lo craft docked in space with a Sovi­et Soyuz vehi­cle, and Amer­i­can astro­nauts and shook hands in space with Sovi­et cosmonauts.