Don’t say it, I know:  If you want to keep readers you gotta give em something to read. I’m sorry, I really am, but I have had so much on my plate this year that something had to go, and blogging never paid my bills, so… I have missed writing this blog though.  Every once in a while, I’d turn my neck from all these computer monitors and look out the window.  I’d blink about a hundred times and think, “I just thought of a great post, I miss that blog.” I wasn’t sure anyone would still be around after such a long haitus, then one day a flurry of notifications came into my inbox from my long neglected friends (that’s you guys). Hundreds of comments being posted on this post told... [Read more]

My apologies everyone for not posting for so long.  There’ve been some personal developments that I really can’t go into but I wanted to let you know that my posts will be fewer, at least for the short term.  I’m trying to juggle a lot of things right now, and I’ve had to prioritize things such that the blog just isn’t getting the attention it deserves. Things are fine, I’m fine, but once in a while, life piles a bunch of crap on you all at once and you have to deal with it, that’s what I’m doing now.  Please hang in there and thanks so much for your patience. I’m  on the lookout for some help during this time to help keep the blog alive, other people who may feel like... [Read more]

Okay, new contest. Sudoku for Astronomy Haiku. It’s easy. Write me haikus and you could win your very own Sudoku Hand-held Game! So, anyway, here is the deal: I have somehow ended up with two very nice hand-held electronic sudoku games. One of them, the igadget sudoku, even has a backlit screen. Fancy. The other one is called a Sudoku Advance. I am giving them away to the authors of the two best haikus. Winner takes their pick of these two brand-new sudoku handheld games, and second-place gets the other one! They both are loaded with over a million puzzles of varying levels so you can sudoku yourself silly. Okay, so submit your astronomy haikus to me, people! Post them in the comments of this blog post. I got a really, really... [Read more]

Many of you have probably heard this story, but I am going to blog about it for the heck of it because I love this story so much. The most famous version of this story is pretty much the way it appeared in Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time, and it goes like this: “ A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”... [Read more]

s m a i s m r m i l m e p o e t a l e u m i b u n e n u g t t a u i r a s Now rotate your decoder ring two half turns left….. Actually, the above mish-mash of letters is an anagram. An anagram. A, how d’you say? a word scramble. This one was written by none other than Galileo himself (Galileo sometimes wrote in anagrams to keep his discoveries secret). The correct solution to the anagram is “Altissimum planetam tergeminum observavi”. That is Latin for “I have observed the highest (most distant) planet [Saturn] to have a triple form.” He was referring to Saturn’s rings. However, Johannes Kepler, in his attempt to decode Galileo’s anagram, failed to solve the puzzle correctly. Instead he got,... [Read more]