These are some of my cosmology posts
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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.…
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Daylight Saving Time
As mentioned in my previous post, in the early hours of Sunday 27 October the clocks go back an hour throughout the European Union and daylight saving time comes to an end. Although many Europeans will welcome the extra hour in bed on the night of 26/27 October, I suspect that a lot of people…
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Jim Peebles winner of the Noble Prize 2019
I was interested to hear that Jim Peebles, at the age of 84, has won a half share of the 2019 Noble Prize for physics for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology. Jim Peebles (1935-) Image from Wikimedia commons In the early 1960s Peebles and his colleague Robert Dicke had predicted the existence of the microwave…
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The Science Behind Time Zones Explained
Discusses the measurement of time and the use of time zones globally. It explains solar time, apparent solar time, and mean solar time, highlighting how time varies due to Earth’s orbit and tilt. The establishment of standard time zones, particularly through GMT, addresses coordination for transportation and communication..… Continue reading The Science Behind Time Zones Explained…
Explaining Science 