These are some of my cosmology posts
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Satellite navigation – the next ten years
Satellite navigation is such a vital part of day-to-day life that other countries of the world are planning to build up their own network of navigation satellites and move away from total reliance on the American system, GPS. America As mentioned in my previous post, the GPS system is operated and funded by the US government. The first…
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GPS.
The Global Positioning System, better known as GPS, has come to affect countless aspects of our daily lives, from directing our holiday aeroplanes to enabling us to drive round an unfamiliar city without any map other than the one on our mobile phone. At the risk of making myself sound like a scary stalker, I…
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The Evening Star-Venus.
Anybody who has looked up into the western sky after sunset in the past month will have noticed a brilliant white object – the planet Venus, sometimes called the Evening Star. It is brighter than any other planet and ten times brighter than the brightest star Sirius. The “Evening Star” Venus next to the Moon…
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Happy New Year 2017
Happy New Year to all my readers and followers. I hope that you all will continue to read and enjoy my blog 🙂 For many people living in the USA the most memorable event of the coming year will not be the inauguration of the new president but the total solar eclipse, which I’ll talk about…
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Christmas Day – December 25th or January 7th?
Merry Christmas to all my readers and followers and I wish you all a happy New Year. The majority of people who celebrate Christmas Day, whether for religious or cultural reasons or both, do so on 25 December. However, followers of the Orthodox churches generally celebrate Christmas Day thirteen days later, on January 7. The reasons…
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December 31 2016 Leap Second
On New Year’s Eve an extra second will be added to the end of the day. This extra second is called a leap second. As I’ll explain later, leap seconds need to be added periodically to bring the time we measure with accurate atomic clocks in line with the natural time which results from the rotation of the…
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An idea for Christmas from Explaining Science
Revised 12 December 2025 Now that Christmas is nearly upon us, if you’ve not done so already why not treat yourself to an e-book from Explaining Science. If you’d like to know more about popular astronomy , I’ve written three e-books which are available in the Amazon Kindle store at a nominal cost. By…
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Chinese manned space programme
On 18 November two Chinese astronauts, Jing Haipeng and Chen Dong, landed back on Earth after spending 33 days in space, an event which was hardly reported in the western media. During their mission they spent 30 days aboard the Tiangong-2 space station. Image from the Chinese National Space Administration Tiangong-2, shown in the mission patch above, is the second…
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The long summer evenings
This post talks about two interesting effects to do with the way it get dark after the Sun has set. The first one, which anyone who has travelled to places lying at different latitudes will have seen, is that the closer you are to the equator the quicker it gets dark after the Sun has…
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Schiaparelli on Mars -updated
As most of you will already know, and much to our disappointment, the Schiaparelli probe failed to land successfully on Mars last Wednesday. The plan was that when it entered the Martian atmosphere, the spacecraft would immediately begin to slow down to 1700 km/h as a result of the friction caused by the atmosphere hitting its heat-shield. When it reached…
Explaining Science 