Mon, 07 Jan 2008

NASA's webpage for the July 22 2009 solar eclipse

NASA's eclipse guy Fred Espenak has published the official page for next year's total solar eclipse.

Wed, 05 Dec 2007

Catalog of ancient and medieval eclipses

Here's an interesting summary of ancient solar eclipses and contemporary accounts of them. The neat thing about eclipses is that their details can be computed down to the minute even across a few thousand years, giving us prefectly precise dates for some historical events.

Wed, 07 Nov 2007

Exoplanets

Here's a website devoted to planets around other stars - the current count is 220.

Tue, 02 Oct 2007

Farewell to the bookmobile

Anna Badkhen writes in the Boston Globe about the declining fortunes of the bookmobile. A guy from the Decatur Public Library drove one to Findlay every other week during the summers of the late 1970s. That's where I found my first Isaac Asimov, the sci-fi novels of the 1970s, and a lot of astronomy and cosmology - I'd carry home an armload to stack on a table in the living room and make my way through them in the following days,