Ghulf Genes

…to the south and to the north of due East. Indeed the sun rises in the East only on two days of the year, March 20 and September 23, the v...

We were returning from an outing the other night (on the 19th) and Venus in the sky had a great brilliance. In the wonder of watching it—on ...

Last night was a supermoon, thus the coincidence of a full moon taking place very close to the time when the moon is closest to the earth. ...

A story in today’s Wall Street Journal ( link ) reports on the discovery of what may be a new planet forming in the gaseous disk surroundi...

Reading a truly excellent science popularization, Stephen S. Hall’s Mapping the Next Millennium , made me aware of developments in astronom...

The German Gustav Spörer (1822-1885), who had studied mathematics and astronomy, began as a school teacher but then, at age 36, turned to a...

To spell it out, our closest solar neighbor, Alpha Centauri, has three suns. Of these Alpha Centauri A is the biggest; it is about 10 percen...

There is a category of stars, known as the cepheid variables, that grow bright from a relatively dim state within a fixed period of days and...

In a literal sense we live in an age of enlightenment—meaning that the lights of cities are so bright that they make the night-sky almost in...

The physicist David Bohm used to say that physicist were not physical enough. They relied too much on mathematical equations and had no, as ...

Today’s the day of the autumnal equinox. I understand it better this year than ever before. In the course of writing a post on the astrolabe...

The trials and traumas of being a science-fiction writer? There are plenty, let me tell you. How do you reconcile the following, for instanc...

In looking up how distance is measured in astronomy, I came across something that tells about change in our times. The person who discovered...

Welcome Spring and so forth. I note that the weather, which cooperated magnificently for about the last two weeks of so-called Winter, refus...

Valentine’s day is now well, well behind us, but in this household it was a late bloomer. In a reversal of 50 years’ tradition, Brigitte dec...