These are some of my cosmology posts
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Dark Sky Places
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…
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Staying on the Moon
Until the outbreak of the global pandemic there was a good chance that mankind would return to the Moon in the next ten years, even if the deadline of project Artemis to have a manned mission in 2024 was a little ambitious. It will be some time before the effects of the current crisis on…
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Why Venus Shines Brightly
Updated 22 November 2025 Anyone, even the most casual observer, looking at the evening sky in the last month will have noticed the brilliant white planet Venus shining in the west. Often known as the Evening Star, Venus is the third brightest natural object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. In this…
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Measuring and Mapping Light Pollution
Updated 16 December 2025 As discussed in my earlier post on Dark Skies , light pollution is a major nuisance to astronomers both amateur and professional. When astronomers classify how much light pollution there is at a particular location, they often use the Bortle Scale, devised by John Bortle and first published in the popular astronomy…
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British coverage of Apollo 11
Last year as all my readers will know was the fiftieth anniversary of the first Apollo Moon landing. Image credit NASA Although the pictures and video from the Apollo 11 mission, including Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the Moon, are famous throughout the world and are freely available on platforms such as YouTube, it is…
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SpaceX Starlink Satellites (2020)
Update 16 March 2022- click on the image below to view a video of much of the information in this post Many of you will have seenthe pictures in 2019 showing long ‘trains’ composed of as many as sixty SpaceX Starlink satellites crossing the sky. A ‘train’ of SpaceX Starlink satellites just after their…
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Happy New Year 2020
Happy New Year! And happy new decade! 2020 could well be an important year for manned space flight. It might be the year that America finally puts humans back into space on American spacecraft. If this happens it will be on spacecraft designed and built by commercial companies rather than NASA. . The landing of…
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e-book on Venus and how to Terraform it
Updated 7 December 2025 I have extensively expanded and rewritten all three “A Short Guide to…” e-books. These books available on Kindle for a competitive price I hope you enjoy reading the new versions of these books (if you’ve not done so already). Venus is, the planet closest to the Earth in size and internal…
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The evenings are drawing out already
Updated 13 December 2025 —————————— As I complete this post, it’s completely dark outside and it’s only 5 o’clock in the afternoon; most people I come across think that it will continue to get dark earlier and earlier in the afternoons until the date of the winter solstice which for the UK in 2025 falls…
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The discovery of dark energy
The is a now an expanded and updated version of this post available at: https://explainingscience.org/2020/12/10/dark-energy-an-unexpected-finding/ The Expansion of the Universe Astronomers have known since the late 1920’s that the Universe is expanding. By this we mean that distances between objects which are not bound together by another force, such as gravity, increase over time.…
Explaining Science 