Secrets of the Juno spacecraft
Last week the space headlines were all about Jupiter. A billion-dollar spacecraft named Juno successfully fired its engine and went into
All posts by Bob Berman
Farpoint on the Fourth: Our planet at its slowest
Earth reaches its farpoint on the Fourth of July. This is aphelion, when we are 94 million miles from old Sol. This three-percent
Is Earth flat?
I just got back from the Wanderlust Festival in Vermont. My company, Slooh, wants to expand our audience. They thought it would
Honey Moon on the Solstice: It hasn’t happened since 1948
It’s rare, all right. A full Moon last landed smack on the Solstice in the 1940s. It’s the kind of thing that
Is the Singularity coming?
Stephen Hawking made headlines at the end of 2014 when, in a BBC interview, he said that we should be
Government conspiracy…or just jet contrails?
In one of the newspapers in which Almanac Weekly appears, the same letter-writers offer repeated excursions into sinister conspiracy and
The math that destroys space and time
Professional astronomers use math routinely. Their journals brim with equations that can resemble the markings on Inca tablets. This holds
Monday’s transit of Mercury: The year’s biggest sky event?
If you know any backyard astronomers, you’ve heard them rant and rave about the upcoming transit of Mercury. It is
When does science cross over into hype?
Some have always questioned the space program. They point to a particular mission – for example NASA’s Juno spacecraft to
It’s the year’s best time to observe the innermost planet
The innermost planet is weird in so many ways, it’s hard to find aspects that aren’t strange. This is the