Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Little Prince” lived on an asteroid scarcely larger than himself. As readers of the childhood classic will remember, his companions were a sheep and a rose, and some baobab seedlings that he carefully weeded, lest they grow into giant trees that would split his tiny world.
Astronomy
The asteroid Eros imaged by the NEAR spacecraft • NASA/JPL/JHUAPL (Public Domain)
Mars Global Surveyor image showing evidence of recent water flow on the surface of Mars • NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems (Public Domain)
Mars photos give us something to drink in
We thrilled to the recent photographs from Mars showing what appear to be relatively recent water channels on the red planet.
Photo by Inbal Malca on Unsplash
Do you see what I see?
“We have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him,” the Magi tell King Herod in Matthew’s gospel.
The Apollo 12 lunar lander over the Moon • NASA (Public Domain)
Stirring color images from black-and-white lunar landscape
Seldom has a scientific and technological story been turned into higher art than Michael Light’s Full Moon, a volume of photographs from the Apollo missions to the Moon.
The total solar eclipse of 1999 • Image by Luc Viatour (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In the dark on the Black Sea
It was a long way to go for two-and-a-half minutes of darkness.
The Earth and its abstraction
Secret of not knowing
Twenty-two hundred years ago, in the city of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile River, a fellow named Eratosthenes drew a circle on papyrus and said, “This is the Earth.”
Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash
Looking for ET online
It is a marriage made in heaven. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and personal computers.
Artist's impression of the current oldest known galaxy, GN-z11 • Image by Pablo Carlos Budassi (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Peering through the Hubble Telescope to our distant past
A few weeks ago, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope said they discovered the most distant object yet observed in the universe — a galaxy 13 billion light-years from Earth.
Artist's rendering of the proposed Square Kilometre Array • Image by SPDO/TDP/DRAO/Swinburne Astronomy Productions (CC BY 3.0)
The scientific law of Que Sera, Sera
In his autobiography, the brilliant physicist John Archibald Wheeler makes this confession of faith: “Whatever can be, is.”
Illustration of Cassini exploring Saturn • Image by Kevin Gill (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Cassini’s slingshot tour
On the evening of February 23, Venus overtook Jupiter in the evening sky. The two planets gleamed together in a pairing of rare closeness. Both fit neatly into the field of a small telescope, with all four of Jupiter’s Galilean moons.