Category Archives: astronomy news

astronomy, astronomy news, Kepler mission

You May NOT Be Able to Go to Space

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But Your Name Can!

The fine folks at NASA’s Kepler mission are working on a spacecraft that will go into space to survey the Milky Way to look for stars that might have life-bearing worlds orbiting them. Now, the spacecraft isn’t GOING to those planets; it’s just going up to near-Earth space to get out from under our blurry atmosphere. Out in space, the seeing will be much better, and theoretically anyway, the instruments will be able to see things in finer detail (like a planet) around all those stars it will survey.

Now, while it might be a lot of fun to actually go to all those planets, the realities of space travel (notably the time it takes to go from one star to another) make it impossible to do that. But, you can, if you wish, send your name to space aboard the spacecraft. All you have to do is fill out a form at the Kepler website and send it along to the team. It’s as easy as that. Since I don’t have an asteroid named after me yet, I’m going to send my name to space aboard Kepler. Why don’t you try it, too?

astronomy news, magazines

Reading About Astronomy

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In the ‘zines

I got to thinking the other day about where it is that people read about astronomy. There are, especially with the Web, countless places to learn about the beautiful science of astronomy. If you’re an aficionado, you already know about such print titles as Sky & Telescope, Astronomy, Stern und Weltraum, Skynews, TheAstronomer, Amateur Astronomy Magazine, Astronomy and Space, Astronomy Now, Ciel et Espace, Coelum, Tenmon Guido (Japan), and many others. And, of course, there are countless really good astronomy sites, written by such avid participants as Daniel Fischer in his Cosmic Mirror site and the ever-busy website for the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers, plus the sites I’ve got listed in my sidebar.

I often get asked which magazine is my favorite. I’ve read many of them, written for several, and of course, I worked for Sky & Telescope in the late 1990s, so I got a chance to contribute to the medium that way. I spent four years as editor of Sky Publishing’s SkyWatch magazine, and my interest there was to make a magazine that beginners could use to explore astronomy. It was fun and fulfilling, and I still have a number of people mention how much they enjoyed the magazine during my tenure as its editor.

All of these magazines are useful and good. For beginners I’ve always recommended Astronomy Magazine, or the special titles put out by Sky Publishing. It seems that Sky & Telescope is geared to those who have already been bitten by the bug of astronomy a bit harder than the folks who are just getting to know the science. But, that may change. They have a new editor in chief coming on board in June, so who knows what will happen there? Anyway, both are good magazines, so you can’t go wrong with either one. Of course, we’re not limited to just these two — as you can see from my list above, there are many magazines, in many languages, all speaking the same language of astronomy.