I’m a big fan of astronomer Phil Plait’s “Bad Astronomy” blog. Plait opens his April 1st article (no joke) titled “At the Heart of the Milky Way Galaxy” like this: Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a ridiculously huge collection of gas, dust, and stars … something like 200 billion stars, give or take. That’s […]
cosmos
How big is the Solar System?
If you haven’t seen this 7 minute movie on the scale of the universe (which was just released on September 16th) then you need to. It’s amazing. My only quibble is that they placed the edge of the Solar System at Neptune’s orbit (3.5 miles by scale from the Sun) rather than at the heliopause (which […]
Cosmos meets Logos: If Carl Sagan had been a conservative Christian
I don’t know if you ever stopped to ask yourself, “What would the original ‘Cosmos’ have been like if Carl Sagan had been a conservative Christian?” Well now you know. Check out this very clever satire by Reasonable Doubts Podcast with Sagan’s doppelganger being voiced by Jeremy Beahan who, based on this performance, could have […]
The stellar new “Cosmos”: A Review
On Sunday night, 34 years after the debut of the immortal Carl Sagan miniseries “Cosmos” on PBS, viewers were treated to the first episode of the new miniseries “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey” with Neil deGrasse Tyson. The program began with Tyson speaking on the same rocky coastline from which Sagan had initiated the first “Cosmos” […]
Another pale blue dot
Twenty-three years ago the Voyager space probe gave us the iconic image of earth as a pale blue dot, an image immortalized by Carl Sagan in his majestic book Pale Blue Dot. A few days ago the Cassini probe sent back its own entry to the pale blue dot catalogue, a haunting image of earth as […]
