News
July 1, 2023 - HAPPY CANADA DAY!!
June 28, 2023 - There is another interesting announcement from the astronomy community today, with reports that a global collaboration of astronomers have managed to detect the gravitational wave background for the first time. While scientists have previously detected a few gravitational waves from major astrophysical events using terrestrial interferometers, this is the first time that they were able to use galactic pulsars as a gravitational wave detector and in doing so detect these much weaker signals. It is a great step forward in the study of both supermassive black holes and in the underlying theory of gravity. Congratulations to all of the teams involved in this historic achievement!
June 18, 2023 - Happy Father's Day to all the fathers and grandfathers in the world!
May 14, 2023 - Happy Mother's Day!
April 15, 2023 - There is an interesting piece of news from the space exploration and planetary science community today (actually it was yesterday, but the news came out today), with the launch of the JUICE mission. This is a planetary probe that will spend the next eight years traveling through space to the planet Jupiter, where it will then explore three of the ice moons there before settling into a long term orbit of Ganymede. Although JUICE is not equipped with life detecting experiments, these three moons are among the best hope of finding alien life in our own Solar system and thus this is perhaps one of the most interesting missions in many years.
April 9, 2023 - HAPPY EASTER!!
April 3, 2023 - Congratulations to the four astronauts selected for the Artemis II mission today, which will be the first manned mission to the moon in over fifty years, and especially to Jeremy Hansen who will become the first Canadian to travel to the moon and back.
March 28, 2023 - For those of you who are lucky enough to live in regions with clear skies, this week we will be seeing five planets aligned in the night sky - specifically the planets Mars, Uranus, Venus, Mercury and Jupiter. Most of them will be visible to the naked eye, and this event will not repeat until 2040 so it is worth taking a look.
February 1, 2023 - A reminder for those who haven't seen it already, comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) will be at its most visible over the next few nights. It only comes around every fifty-thousand years, so (weather permitting) perhaps step out into the night and have a look!
January 3, 2023 - It wouldn't be Christmas without a technical glitch, but at least this year it is relatively minor. Some users are reporting that my websites are not loading, and giving a 'too many redirections' error instead. So far I haven't been able to replicate this error on my own machines, and there are actually no redirects on many of the affected pages. My suspicion is that there is a fault in the webhost's server, but their technical support people don't return to work until next week. I apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused.
January 1, 2023 - HAPPY NEW YEAR!!
December 25, 2022 - MERRY CHRISTMAS!!