These are some of my cosmology posts
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The Perseids Meteor Shower 2025
The night of 12/13 August will be the peak of the Perseids, 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 (in the case of the Perseids around 200,000 km/h).…
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Twilight and the Long Summer Evenings
There are extended daylight hours and twilight periods during summer at northern latitudes The article focusses on Manchester and Shetland. It defines twilight and its three stages, highlights the Sun’s path at various times of the year, and explains the phenomenon of “Simmer Dim” in Shetland and the celebrations associated with these light nights.… Continue…
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NASA’s Artemis Moon Missions
In March 2019 the American Vice President Mike Pence surprised many people when he announced an extremely ambitious plan to put American astronauts on the Moon in 2024. NASA named its new crewed Moon programme Artemis, after Apollo’s sister in Greek mythology. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the dates have slipped since this extremely ambitious announcement. After numerous…
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The June Solstice at Ness Point
I saw this article on the BBC News website. about people watching the Sun rise on the June solstice at Ness Point (lat 52.481 oN, long 1.763 oE), which is the UK’s most easterly location. Source Dozens watch sunrise at UK’s most easterly point – BBC News It is impressive that 200 people got up…
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June 21 2025 – the solstice
In 2025, for most people in the world the June solstice will fall on 21 June. For those of us living in the the Northern Hemisphere, it is the day of the year when there is the most daylight. The origin of the word solstice is from two Latin words: sol, which means Sun, and sistere, to…
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The Oort Cloud
The Oort Cloud, theorized by Jan Oort in 1950, is a vast, icy structure beyond the Solar System, containing trillions of objects. It is divided into the sparse outer cloud and the denser, doughnut-shaped inner cloud. Evidence for its existence includes the orbits of long-period comets. Galactic tides and interactions with giant planets likely contributed…
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Venus the Morning Star
Anybody who has observed the eastern sky just before sunrise in the last few weeks will have noticed a brilliant white object – the planet Venus, also known as the morning star. It is brighter than any other planet and at its brightest ten times brighter than Sirius the brightest star. Its brightness has often…
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The Lyrids 2025
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…
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Hydrogen-Powered Vehicles: A Green Alternative?
Hydrogen vehicles use fuel cells to produce electricity, but their carbon footprint remains significant due to hydrogen production methods, primarily steam methane reforming. Additionally, while hydrogen can be produced greenly, green hydrogen is currently expensive and only makes up a small portion of global production. The only hydrogen car available in the UK is the…
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Challenges of Electric Vehicle Battery Technology
Updated November 25 2025 In what is a departure from my usual topics of astronomy and space science, I’ve written a series of posts on the transition to electric vehicles. In this post I’ll discuss the issues of the lifetime of EV batteries, their lower energy density compared to traditional hydrocarbon fuels and the secondhand…
Explaining Science 