I read about this very bright object being shot up into orbit around Earth earlier this year, just to twinkle in natural sunlight as an artificial star for a few months. And I noted that it would be visible from Norway on April 24-25 2018. I’ve had this date marked on my calendar since I […]
I like that the word “parallel”—if written in a sans serif font—contains a parallel. What also contains a parallel, is astronomy and from there, astrology. Keep reading if you want to see me attempt to explain the tilt of the planet. First of all, let’s get one thing in our heads: All the planets, except […]
Well, sort of. I wasn’t actually there. But on the top of Mauna Kea is where Tom works and where he takes so many of his gorgeous pictures of the sunset. I have now learned that he has been goofing off (according to the gentleman on this video) when doing that. He should have been […]
Sometimes I do my best writing in other people’s comments. Not fair to you, dear reader, so I’ll repost and elaborate here. The discussion in the link above was about the weather. If you’ve been paying attention to my sidebar, you know that I now have another blog where I post weather forecasts made with […]
I’m not the romantic kind. My version of romance doesn’t involve notes, flowers, boxes of candy or trinkets because that’s just not exciting enough for me (of course, it does depend on what you put in the note 😉 ). Laughing or crying together over a shared memory or adventure is much more my style, […]
This brilliant film is making the rounds. I found mine over at A Pacific View. Here’s the comment I left there after seeing this video: Absolutely stunning video! Finally one that clearly gave me an idea of scale. Especially going back home. If any aliens are visiting us, it must be purely by accident, because […]
The latest activity to capture the interest of the fringe and lunatics (never was that description more apt) is the fact that NASA/the US is going to set off a nuclear bomb and blast our dear Luna out of its orbit. Following the sage advice of others to consider Google my friend (though there are […]
It has bugged me for quite some time that I couldn’t remember where I was when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon exactly 40 years ago today. I knew I was in Norway, on Grandpa’s family farm in Mundal (in LindÃ¥s, not the Mundal in Sogn that former vice-president Mondale came from) and […]
Wordless Wednesday
Wordless WednesdayCourtesy of xkcd – because it wowed me.
I have returned home from my roundtrip to Trondheim in connection with the celebration of St. Olav and just a general look around some of Norway’s most beautiful parts. It was five days of heat, sunshine, miles and miles of roads through miles and miles of mountains, trees and farms to a couple of charming […]
I’m sending my name to the moon. My name – Keera Ann Fox – gets a ride with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, on a microchip. I love the idea of getting to send my name. Makes me go back to the giddy days of the 1960’s and the space race and those who first orbited […]
“White nights” are what the Russians call the pale summer nights of midsummer according to the movie by the same name. In Norwegian, the term is “blond nights” but most people just say “long, light summer night”. Because that’s what is. I am talking about this because Jon asked me a question in a comment: […]
My job interview went very well. The job was actually far more demanding and interesting than I thought. In other words, it is a very hard job to turn down – if I get an offer. I’ll know by the end of the week. In the mean time, I went and talked to my boss […]
Norway’s channel NRK2 ran a couple of documentaries on UFOs followed by “Close Encounter of the Third Kind”. I taped it and finally sat down to watch it. I was delighted with the movie when it first came out. Now, the ending seems too cute and too easy. More importantly, though, I’ve discovered that my […]
I watch “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and during the opening credits, this bizarre if-Saturn-were-hot-lava planet shows up, both confounding me and fascinating me: I was wondering if a planet can really look like that (I still am), when I came across this APOD image of Saturn, photographed in infrared:
On this planet we have deaf drummers and composers. Our planet may now be fostering blind astronomers. Via Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog, I have learned of a woman who had a marvelous idea: Making astronomy books you can touch so the seeing impaired, too, can discover what’s up in the sky. Head over to […]
I read the Bad Astronomy blog, mainly because it’s fun to know the correct thing about something. Like the fact that our planet (Earth, in case you were wondering) is not the only planet to experience solar eclipses. Saturn does, too, by virtue of being so far away, that its moons appear bigger than the […]
I just bought a book, Astronomy, Weather, and Calendars in the Ancient World, partly because of the introductory chapter. There, a method for “borrowing days” to predict the weather was mentioned: The weather on the day before the winter solstice forecasts the weather for the first month of winter, the weather on the day of […]
The title of this blogpost happens to be the title of my work-in-progress (WIP) at NaNoWriMo (see widget to the left). It’s actually the whimsical title of a couple of galaxies, which was the Astronomy Picture of the Day on October 12. For lack of a better title for a WIP, I stole this. I […]
A Roll in the Universe 