Illustrator Orbit Planet

Tonight, I saw Mercury for the first time. Mercury is a hard planet to see, even though it is quite bright, because it's orbit is so close to the sun. The angle Mercury makes with the Earth and the Sun is never more than about 25 degrees and most of the time it is much less. A ...more

Note: This shower is only visible in the Northern Hemisphere. The Quadrantid meteor shower is one of my personal favorites, mainly because of the amount of meteors it produces. You can sight more than 100 meteors per hour- that's more than 1 meter per minute. Even though that ...more

When it comes to live wallpaper for your Android device, the choices are pretty much limitless. Anything from a planet's elliptical orbit around the sun to a school of fish swimming across your screen are just a click and a download away. With the advancement of smartphones, l ...more

Forget the rise of the machines. Tardigrades are set to outlive everything — even the bots. When the last echo of a whisper in a cell phone has long dissipated into space, the water bears will still be hanging out. In Hollywood, there is a never-ending march of movies set in ...more

The Tesla-riding Starman that was launched into space via Elon Musk's SpaceX last week will miss its Mars target and is instead headed toward a lonely asteroid belt in the void of space. But if you missed the initial launch and would like to get a taste of what Starman is seei ...more

Ever wonder why Jupiter has those colored bands across its surface? Jupiter's enormous mass is made from an array of different liquids, and those fluids do not play well together because of their different makeup. All of the hydrogen- and helium-based fluids are thought not to ...more

NASA announced yesterday that their Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-sized planets orbiting a sun-like star outside of our solar system. Could this mean aliens? Unfortunately, no. The two newly discovered planets, Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are 0.87 and 1.03 time ...more

Recent research published in an issue of Nature suggests that there are actually more planets in our universe than stars. Using the Milky Way as the focus, the researchers found that each star has an average of about 1.6 planets in orbit around it, which suggests that extrasol ...more

The crew from NASA's International Space Station wish planet Earth a heartwarming Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. (Check out flight engineer Cady Coleman's hair. Zero gravity is awesome.) For the nostalgic, the legendary Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the Moon, wi ...more

A six-year survey of millions of stars in the Milky Way found that nearly every star has orbiting planets. This means: 100+ billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is one of 170+ billion galaxies. My math isn't that good, what's 100 billion x 170 billion? Mo ...more

Browsing and displaying your music library on the iPad is a cinch with Apple's iPod app. But by no means would it be considered exciting. Thankfully, there's another option for sorting and playing your iTunes library. It's a unique iPad-only application for those of us who wan ...more

There's not much going on this week in the skies above, but there are a lot of conjunctions to take a peek at! And of course, there's the comet Garradd that's still showing its tail to us down here on Earth, so make sure to catch it before it's gone. The rest that's going on t ...more

The recent report of the ubiquity of extrasolar planets coupled with the fact that it bodes well for searches for life friendly Earth twins, brought me back to my reading of Carl Sagan's 1966 Intelligent Life In The Universe and later article in Sky & Telescope where he came u ...more

I woke up at 4:00 am this morning in order to take some video of the last total lunar eclipse visible from North America till 2014. The eclipse was beautiful. It was amazing to watch the shadow of our planet creep slowly across our nearest neighbor. Once the shadow was blockin ...more

I'm starting a series on the top astronomers, with probably about eleven astronomers that I will be covering overall. So, let's start out from the top, with the top most important astronomer. In my opinion, Galileo Galilei is the top astronomer. Galileo Galilei (February 15, ...more

Let's say today is your birthday. You've just put those boisterous, vicenarian times behind you, reaching the first big step to your upcoming midlife crisis—30 years old. Maybe this is your midlife crisis. After all, if you're not where you want to be in life when you join the ...more

In 1965, the world was a different place. There was no Google yet. Or Yahoo. Or Stumbleupon, for that matter. In 1965, the year of your birth, the top selling movie was The Sound of Music. People buying the popcorn in the cinema lobby had glazing eyes when looking at the pos ...more

If you're like me, you were disappointed when NASA cut their human space flight program. No longer could children and adults in dead-end jobs dream of someday walking on the surface of the Moon or drinking floating globules of water through a straw. Homo sapiens as a species a ...more

Since the 1960s, bacteria have been hopping a ride into space on space vehicles and astronauts, and have been cultivated within experiments on space shuttles and the International Space Station (ISS). The extreme growing conditions and the low gravity environment on the Earth- ...more

HoloLens developer Michael Peters of In-Vizible has released quite a few videos since receiving his HoloLens last year. Many of his experiments are odd and funny, but some include serious potential approaches to data visualization. In the videos embedded below, you'll specific ...more

On July 20, 1969, humans set foot on the moon for the first time. But some say our microbes beat us there. With the Space Age came new questions about microscopic invaders from outer space and concern about where we are leaving our microbial footprints. The questions are even ...more

Earlier this year, NASA reported on findings that might point to water, and microbial life, on moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn. Named Europa and Enceladus, those moons contain large oceans under their icy surfaces, which many speculate could hold microbial life. On Earth, l ...more

Our universe has never been closer thanks to Apple's ARKit. YouTube user Jenil Kansara has been playing around with ARKit features and created a solar system in his room. The cool part about this is that the planets orbit the sun, it's not just a stagnant rendering. He seems ...more

Lucid dreaming, in which you're aware that you're dreaming, can be profoundly beneficial to us. It gives us freedom to do things we couldn't possibly do in the real world. It can show us the true potential of our brain power. You can even use lucid dreaming to question the nat ...more

One developer has taken the formal name of the Magic Leap One: Creator Edition quite literally with an app that enables users to create a custom universe in their own living room. The app, called Universe Creator, by developer Les Bird, allows users to select from a library o ...more

Augmented objects in the classroom are closer than they appear. Within celebrated the close of summer with Wonderscope's unveiling of a fourth installment in its iOS app, titled Clio's Cosmic Quest. This educational AR experience lasts about 10 minutes, and it is designed for ...more

Tardigrades are some of the toughest but least well-known creatures on our planet. These tiny animals, also called moss piglets or water bears, are definitely of this earth, but some can boast that they've also traveled to space. They have been found in the fossil record as l ...more

Virtual reality headsets are all the rage these days, and among the menagerie of tech companies gunning for the top spot, there's one mysterious startup that is ahead of the game—Magic Leap—and you can tell just by watching their latest demo video of their product in action. V ...more

Two years ago, the 50th anniversary of the moon landing gave flight to a handful of Apollo 11 augmented reality apps and experiences, including one from the Smithsonian Channel. Now, as NASA's latest unmanned mission to Mars is scheduled to land on Thursday, the Smithsonian C ...more

Think of the coolest, most unique way to create art that you can. Got it? Now think about creating that art out of living things. The American Society For Microbiology (ASM) holds an annual art contest, but it's no ordinary art they look for. The ASM looks for agar art, which ...more

If we were to assign a theme for the 2019 edition of the Next Reality 30 (NR30), it might be something along the lines of, "What have you done for me lately?" Many of the top names in the industry from the 2018 edition remain the same, but their positions have shuffled. The p ...more