Astronomy Items
The night of 22/23 April 2025 will be the peak of the Lyrids, one of the most famous prolific meteor showers. Meteors (also known as shooting stars) are bright streaks of light caused by small lumps of rock or metal called meteoroids hitting the Earth’s atmosphere at very high speed. As they pass through the atmosphere they get… Continue reading The Lyrids 2025
Update 30 August 2025 I have extensively expanded and rewritten all three “A Short Guide to…” e-books. I will make these books available on Kindle for a competitive price. However, in future I won’t do any deals where I offer free or discounted prices on these books for a limited time period. I believe the… Continue reading eBooks from Explaining Science 2024
Astronomers use the magnitude scale to measure the brightness of celestial objects, originally developed by Greek astronomers. Standardized by Norman Pogson in 1856, the scale uses whole and fractional values. Today, it encompasses all luminous objects, with both apparent and absolute magnitudes.
Updated 21 November 2025 In 1.3 million years’ time the star Gliese 710 is forecast to pass within 0.166 light years of the Solar System, 25 times closer than Proxima Centauri which is our current nearest star (excluding the Sun of course). The close approach of Gliese 710 will be the strongest disrupting encounter known… Continue reading Gliese 710: The Closest Future Star Encounter
In 2024 September 22 is the date of the September equinox and is also the first day of autumn (or the first day of spring if you're one of my readers in the Southern Hemisphere). In this post I’ll talk about the equinoxes and discus the commonly held, but not quite correct, view that they… Continue reading September 22 2024 – the equinox
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