“Stars are beautiful, but they must not take an active part in anything, they must just look on forever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was.”
While we on Earth suffer from coronavirus, our star — the Sun — is having a lockdown all of its own. The sun has been reported to have a ‘very deep’ solar minimum with 100 days of 2020 not seeing any sunspots on its surface. The sun is heading toward solar minimum now.
The Chandrayaan-2 mission serves as the second phase of India’s Chandrayaan lunar exploration program and is a follow-on to the…
Megalithic monuments are among the earliest and most permanent of archaeological structures, and so many of them were used, or more properly, have been used and reused for thousands of years. Their original intent is likely lost to the ages, but they may have had multiple functions as they were used by different cultural groups over the centuries and millennia.
Chandrasekhar became famous for his discoveries about the evolution of the stars. His work was vast, and he began early, developing his theory of stars’ evolution before he had even turned 20. Google is changing its logo globally to a doodle of him and the Chandrasekhar Limit. That refers to his calculation that once a star reaches 1.44 times the size of our own sun, it doesn’t form a white dwarf as expected but collapses, eventually becoming a black hole.
India has created history today by successfully launching 104 satellites on a single mission, overtaking the previous record for most spacecraft launched at a single attempt, which currently stands at the thirty-eight orbited by Russia’s Dnepr in June 2014, of which thirty-two were deployed from the rocket itself while a thirty-third failed to separate. Salute to ISRO scientists!
Zodiacal signs are of equal length whereas the zodiacal constellations are not equal in length. Whether or not you believe horoscopes are worthwhile, it seems Ophiuchus won’t be disrupting our astrological zodiac any time soon.
The full moon known as this year’s Harvest Moon — a moon that appears bigger and brighter than usual due to its close proximity to earth — rises tonight coincided with a minor, penumbral lunar eclipse for many people in Asia and Africa. That won’t happen again until 2024.
Today, the summer solstice and full moon coincide — a rare event, indeed, that hasn’t happened in nearly 70 years, according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac. It’s a once-in-a-generation pairing: the start of astronomical summer and emergence of the full “Strawberry Moon.” June’s full Strawberry Moon got its name because the native American Algonquin tribes knew it as a signal to gather ripening strawberry fruit.
Makar Sankranti is about nature, energy of the sun, harvest of new crop, and progress of mankind. It marks the end of Malmaas, an inauspicious month in the Hindu (Panchang) calendar, and the transition of the Sun to the zodiacal sign of Makar (Capricorn) to herald a change in season.
Today, the northern hemisphere is experiencing the shortest day of the year. The winter solstice marks the shortest daylight period, but it’s not the day of the latest sunrise or earliest sunset. In the mid-latitudes the earliest sunset occurs in early December, while the latest sunrise is not until early January.
