In this post I'm going to talk about a new 500 million dollar telescope, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), being built at Cerro Pachón in Chile, and the survey of the cosmos it will be undertaking over a 10 year period. Cerro Pachón is located in the foothills of the Andes at a latitude… Continue reading Surveying the Cosmos – Part I
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On May 27, SpaceX's Dragon 2 capsule will launch aboard a Falcon 9 rocket sending NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station. The lift-off will mark the return of orbital human spaceflight from the USA for the first time since the Space Shuttle retired in 2011. To mark this event… Continue reading First American crewed spaceflight since 2011
In this post I will talk about the work of the International Dark-Sky Association (https://www.darksky.org/)and the visit I made a few years ago to the Kielder Observatory, which is in the Northumberland Dark Sky park in northern England. The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) was founded in 1988 by David Crawford a professional astronomer, who spent… Continue reading Dark Sky Places
Updated April 2026 The last humans to visit the lunar surface were the Apollo 17 astronauts back in December 1972, who spent only three days there. It is interesting to consider what it would be like to be on its surface for a period of a least a month and watch at first-hand how the… Continue reading Staying on the Moon
Explaining Science 