Month: July 2015

No wordy blog post tonight – did that last night. But I thought I’d share with you a few gems I found on Youtube: the live coverage of past planetary encounters. I hope you enjoy this stuff like I do. … Read more

Here we are, on the eve of our closest – and perhaps, for my lifetime, only? – visit to tiny Pluto, the body which marks the outermost boundary of the “classical solar system”. My generation was brought up counting nine planets; it’s only in the past decade that the obsessive-compulsive need to shovel things into rigidly defined categories knocked that down to eight.)

It’s humbling to think about it: Pluto is the most recently-discovered of the “classical solar system”, and the only one discovered by an American astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh. Not even Tombaugh could have imagined that, 85 years after he found that speck of light that moved between two still photos of the night sky, we would be there. … Read more