What’s a Planet Anyway?

What is a planet? How would you describe a planet? What makes you a human or a dog a dog, do we have a definition or are we just what we are because we look like what we are? When ancient astronomers started looking at the sky, what they saw was a blanket of twinkling […]

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Shooting Stars

It was a clear night the other evening and I was looking up at the stars that fill the sky, as I do, and with a strike of luck I saw the most amazing shooting star streak across the sky. It seemed closer than the ones I usually see it had a flash of light […]

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Mars Over Manhattan

I just saw the most ridiculous image on a social media site, claiming that there will be two moons visible in our sky on 27 August. The image while cool looking, is just wrong. The claim is that one will be Mars and the other will be our Moon—What?! I’m flabbergasted! TBQF, you would have […]

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The Human Presence

12 April 1961, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin made history by becoming the first human to leave Earth’s atmosphere. Since then just over 560 of Earth’s intelligent race has left her rich-soil ground, to journey into space. Early missions of human space flight tested the abilities to travel and survive in Space, missions such as the Mercury […]

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New Horizons

Three years ago, on July 14th 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto. A planet that had been so far from us that views of it were previously hazy, and most knowledge about it was theories and guesses. Scientists had been back and forth on whether Pluto was bigger than its […]

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The Birth of NASA

In light of the recent announcement of a sixth American military branch, the Space Force,  it maybe interesting to know that all space efforts fell to the Army, Navy, and Air Force prior to 1958. This urged me to discuss the birth of NASA. There are several contributing factors that led to the formation of […]

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Light: The Basics

Are we alone? Is that not the greatest question in space exploration? One of our driving forces to constantly search among the stars for life and learn what we can along the way.  Where do we begin to look for life among the stars, after all the Milky Way alone is estimated to have 150-250 […]

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Free Fall

  What is gravity? A force that pulls us in to Earth, and keeps us grounded, whether we are standing on “top” of the Earth or on the “bottom.” We could dive into to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or Newton’s Theory of Gravitation, and really get into what gravity is, but for now we will […]

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The Importance of Space

When you tell someone you are working towards a degree in Space Studies, the automatic response is usually, “Wow! So you’re going to be an astronaut?” While that would be an amazing career goal, that is not the only thing a degree in Space Studies can offer. Typically, astronauts are mathematicians, engineers, pilots, and doctors. […]

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The Ultimate Voyage

We live in a bubble! The size of our solar system is defined by the boundaries of the heliosphere. The heliosphere simply explained is a bubble–produced by the sun encasing the planets, asteroids, comets, meteorites, and all the “stuff” that comprises our solar system. In the Milky Way, our solar system is just one small […]

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