Showing results for "River" in Astronomy

Africa may have given rise to the first human beings, and Egypt probably gave rise to the first great civilizations, which continue to fascinate modern societies across the globe nearly 5,000 years later. From the Library and Lighthouse of Alexandria to the Great Pyramid at Giza, the ancient Egyptians produced several wonders of the world, revolutionized architecture and construction, created some of the world’s first systems of mathematics and medicine, and established language and art that spread across the known world.

Project Gemini is a neglected part of the US space program. Sandwiched between the excitement of Project Mercury and the sending of the first American astronauts to space and the euphoria of the Apollo Moon landings, Gemini was a step forward rather than a dramatic leap. However, this project achieved many important firsts, including the first spacewalk, the first rendezvous and docking between two spacecraft, the first flights of more than one week’s duration, and many more.

When people look up into the night sky, the stars seem fixed and immutable, as unchanging as the darkness of space itself, but the truth is that stars are born, live, and die in a never-ending cycle of creation and annihilation. These cycles stretch over such vast spans of time that to short-lived humans, they seem to last forever. No one knows just how many stars there are, but their number is almost beyond comprehension.

Today, the Space Race is widely viewed poignantly and fondly as a race to the Moon that culminated with Apollo 11 “winning” the race for the United States. In fact, it encompassed a much broader range of competition between the Soviet Union and the United States that affected everything from military technology to successfully launching satellites that could land on Mars or orbit other planets in the Solar System.

The question of man’s place in the extended universe has been pondered by every known culture since the beginning of recorded history. Lacking the means to prove otherwise, discussions of an alternative to Earth’s solitary existence have remained conceptual. The ongoing debate is spurred by the appearance of unexplainable phenomena through the centuries in the atmosphere and the space beyond, so much so that contact with alien civilizations has been depicted in some of the most ancient examples of representational art.

In 1869, the Atlantic Monthly magazine published a new novella in serial form. This bizarre tale, The Brick Moon, was written by a historian (and Unitarian minister) named Edward Everett Hale, who had already written several well-received novels and articles. However, this was something completely different today, as it was in the genre of what is today considered science fiction. Many people compared the new work to the previous novels of French writer Jules Verne, including From the Earth to the Moon, but Hale’s work was presented as a genuine account of a previous experiment.

Thanks to the various components that have been put together, the International Space Station is bigger and brighter than all other artificial satellites. With relatively low power magnification, people can see the solar panels radiating outward from the numerous international modules which make up the ISS. The reality of that platform, at the edge of the ocean of space, is pretty astounding when looked at from the perspective of history. Only 120 years ago, mankind did not know if it was possible to fly in a heavier-than-air vehicle.

Many of us on Earth live in a home with a street address, city, and zip code. But we have another address, which astronomers and astrophysicists refer to as our "cosmic address": Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, Local Group, Virgo Supercluster, the Universe. Consider the vast scales that our cosmic address spans. Understandably, it's hard for our brains to truly imagine it. Our galaxy, The Milky Way, is populated with somewhere between 100-400 billion stars, one of which is our Sun, an average, run-of-the-mill star.

The Apollo space program is the most famous and celebrated in American history, but the first successful landing of men on the moon, during Apollo 11, had complicated roots dating back over a decade; it also involved one of NASA's most infamous tragedies. Landing on the moon presented an ideal goal all on its own, but the government's urgency in designing the Apollo program was actually brought about by the Soviet Union, which spent much of the 1950s leaving the United States in its dust (and rocket fuel).

While modern technology has helped astronomers view the furthest reaches of the Solar System, it has also allowed scientists to start discovering planets orbiting distant stars. To make it easier to assess the relative mass and size of the new planets being discovered, scientists give these measurements as multiples of those properties for either Jupiter or Earth

During the Age of Exploration, Native American tribes fell victim to European conquerors seeking legendary cities made of gold and other riches, attempts that were often being made in vain. And yet, of all the empires that were conquered across the continent, the one that continues to be most intimately associated with legends of gold and hidden riches is the Inca Empire.

Many ancient civilizations have influenced and inspired people in the 21st century, and the Greeks and Romans continue to fascinate the West today, but of all the world’s civilizations, none have intrigued people more than the Mayans, whose culture, astronomy, language, and mysterious disappearance all continue to captivate people. In the past decade especially, there was a renewed focus on the Maya, whose advanced calendar led many to speculate the world would end on the same date the Mayan calendar ended in 2012.

Mayan Astronomy: The History of the Maya’s Measurements of the Planets and Stars examines what is known and unknown about the Maya’s astronomy, and why their astronomy was among the most accurate in the world.

This quick but comprehensive primer, The Illustrated Guide to the Universe by Bill Andrews of Astronomy magazine, gives a complete overview of our universe, starting with our solar system before moving outward to explore the rest of the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond.