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It's Been A While.

This blog has been for all and intents dead since 2021, sliding into the deepest basements of the back of my brain, forgotten until now in the early infancy of 2025. Little wonder, for in 2022, I began a long and arduous, yet rewarding, journey into my Master of Science in Geophysics that I pursed immediately after my Bachelor of Science in Geology. Now that I have graduated, I now have ample…

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"To Earth, From Jupiter"

“To Earth, From Jupiter”

This is an old writing piece I did for an advanced creative writing class in university way back in 2018. I’ve always intended to make this a full solar system set, but life likes to get in the way. Maybe in the distant future I might, but not when university, especially final year, is looming over me. To Earth, From Jupiter The sun was only a hundred million years old when I began to form, the…

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Amalthea: The Reddest Potato In Orbit Around Jupiter

Amalthea: The Reddest Potato In Orbit Around Jupiter

Everyone knows you shouldn’t eat green potatoes, but what about red potatoes (no, this doesn’t include potatoes with red skins)? I’m not sure on that count, but this red potato would likely taste like, well, rock and a whole lot of radiation courtesy of its parent planet, Jupiter. When I say this moon is red, it’s red, considered as the reddest object in our solar system. It is a moon that is not…

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A-Z Quick Facts: Perihelion

A-Z Quick Facts: Perihelion

Perihelion is the closest approach a celestial body takes to whatever it is orbiting, whether that be our sun (as in the cast of planets and comets, for example), or a planet (such as our Moon around Earth). The opposite of perihelion is aphelion, which is–you guessed it–the farthest point in a celestial body’s orbit around another object. https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/P/Perihelion

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Astronomy Channel Spotlight: Space Mog (Dr. Maggie Lieu)

Astronomy Channel Spotlight: Space Mog (Dr. Maggie Lieu)

While many may know of the more popular and bigger astronomy Youtube channels like SciShow Space, Anton Petrov (‘What da Math’), and even Fraser Cain (Founder of the Universe Today website), as well as Astronomy Cast, there are some less well-known astronomy education channels floating around Youtube, especially those that are, for once, not hosted or created by only white people, with all due…

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This Star is the Roundest Boi

This Star is the Roundest Boi

Generally in astronomy, most round objects like planets, stars, and moons with enough mass to pull itself into a ball, are not perfect spheres. Even if a planet or star looks completely round, they usually have some degree of what astronomers call oblateness. Oblateness, in its simplest definition, relates to how “squashed” a round object appears. Planets (especially gaseous ones) and stars with…

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A-Z Quick Facts: Opposition

A-Z Quick Facts: Opposition

You ever read an astronomy magazine or website and see some variant of this:

“Saturn will be at opposition in July 2020…”

“In September, such-and-such planet/moon will be at opposition…”

What are they doing up there? What are they opposing?

In astronomy, the term oppositionsimply means that a planet (or asteroid, or even the moon) is opposite the sun in the sky. As a result, the…

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Europa and its Perpetual Glow-Up

Europa and its Perpetual Glow-Up

Forget those cute little star stickers you used to have as a kid (or at least I did), because imagine an entire moon that glows in the night sky, and not because it is reflecting light from our favourite star in the universe. Rudolph’s glowing red nose pales next to this super-shiny moon orbiting a planet in our solar system, its light blue, but with little tinges of green and white. So, what…

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A-Z Quick Facts: New Moon

A-Z Quick Facts: New Moon

A “new moon” is considered by astronomers the first lunar phase, with the following crescent moon called a “young moon”. It is also the source of all the stunning total solar eclipses that many people (not me…yet) have had the immense fortune to experience. However, it is the slightly tilted nature of the moon’s orbit, at just over five degrees from the Earth’s orbital plane, that is a main…

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Adrastea: One of Io's Little Friends

Adrastea: One of Io’s Little Friends

Jupiter’s volcanic moon, Io, has four little friends keeping it company in its orbit: Metis, Amalthea, Thebe, and our star of today’s post, Adrastea. It is a humble smol, the tiniest of the quartet in Io’s orbit, at just 8.2km in radius, give or take 2kms. Owing to its place in Io’s orbit, Adrastea snuggles up nice and close to Jupiter, at just 129,000km away from the big boy of our solar system.…

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2020 November 8

Martian Moon Phobos from Mars Express Image Credit: G. Neukum (FU Berlin) et al., Mars Express, DLR, ESA; Acknowledgement: Peter Masek

Explanation: Why is Phobos so dark? Phobos, the largest and innermost of two Martian moons, is the darkest moon in the entire Solar System. Its unusual orbit and color indicate that it may be a captured asteroid composed of a mixture of ice and dark rock. The featured picture of Phobos near the limb of Mars was captured in 2010 by the robot spacecraft Mars Express currently orbiting Mars. Phobos is a heavily cratered and barren moon, with its largest crater located on the far side. From images like this, Phobos has been determined to be covered by perhaps a meter of loose dust. Phobos orbits so close to Mars that from some places it would appear to rise and set twice a day, but from other places it would not be visible at all. Phobos’ orbit around Mars is continually decaying – it will likely break up with pieces crashing to the Martian surface in about 50 million years.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap201108.html

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A Desert Eclipse : A good place to see a ring-of-fire eclipse, it seemed, would be from a desert. In a desert, there should be relatively few obscuring clouds and trees. Therefore late last December a group of photographers traveled to the United Arab Emirates and Rub al-Khali, the largest continuous sand desert in world, to capture clear images of an unusual eclipse that would be passing over. A ring-of-fire eclipse is an annular eclipse that occurs when the Moon is far enough away on its elliptical orbit around the Earth so that it appears too small, angularly, to cover the entire Sun. At the maximum of an annular eclipse, the edges of the Sun can be seen all around the edges of the Moon, so that the Moon appears to be a dark spot that covers most – but not all – of the Sun. This particular eclipse, they knew, would peak soon after sunrise. After seeking out such a dry and barren place, it turned out that some of the most interesting eclipse images actually included a tree in the foreground, because, in addition to the sand dunes, the tree gave the surreal background a contrasting sense of normalcy, scale, and texture. via NASA

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The magnetosphere of Jupiter is the cavity created in the solar wind by the planet’s magnetic field. Extending up to seven million kilometers in the Sun’s direction and almost to the orbit of Saturn in the opposite direction, Jupiter’s magnetosphere is the largest and most powerful of any planetary magnetosphere in the Solar System, and by volume the largest known continuous structure in the Solar System after the heliosphere. Wider and flatter than the Earth’s magnetosphere, Jupiter’s is stronger by an order of magnitude, while its magnetic moment is roughly 18,000 times larger. The existence of Jupiter’s magnetic field was first inferred from observations of radio emissions at the end of the 1950s and was directly observed by the Pioneer 10 spacecraft in 1973. 

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

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A-Z Quick Facts: Magnitude

A-Z Quick Facts: Magnitude

In a nutshell, magnitude is used by astronomers to describe the brightness of a star as seen from Earth; negative numbers denote brighter stars compared to those with positive integers. So a star with -2 magnitude is brighter than one with +2 magnitude. Incidentally, magnitude isn’t reserved just for stars–it also applies to other celestial objects too including the Moon and the other planets in…

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2020 January 27

Comet CG Evaporates Image Credit & License: ESA, Rosetta, NAVCAM

Explanation: Where do comet tails come from? There are no obvious places on the nuclei of comets from which the jets that create comet tails emanate. One of the best images of emerging jets is shown in the featured picture, taken in 2015 by ESA’s robotic Rosetta spacecraft that orbited Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (Comet CG) from 2014 to 2016. The picture shows plumes of gas and dust escaping numerous places from Comet CG’s nucleus as it neared the Sun and heated up. The comet has two prominent lobes, the larger one spanning about 4 kilometers, and a smaller 2.5-kilometer lobe connected by a narrow neck. Analyses indicate that evaporation must be taking place well inside the comet’s surface to create the jets of dust and ice that we see emitted through the surface. Comet CG (also known as Comet 67P) loses in jets about a meter of radius during each of its 6.44-year orbits around the Sun, a rate at which will completely destroy the comet in only thousands of years. In 2016, Rosetta’s mission ended with a controlled impact onto Comet CG’s surface.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200127.html

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2020 January 26

Hills, Ridges, and Tracks on Mars Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS; Processing & Copyright: Thomas Appere

Explanation: Sometimes, even rovers on Mars stop to admire the scenery. Just late last November the Curiosity rover on Mars paused to photograph its impressive surroundings. One thing to admire, straight ahead, was Central Butte, an unusual flat hill studied by Curiosity just a few days before this image was taken. To its right was distant Mount Sharp, the five-kilometer central peak of entire Gale crater, the interior of which Curiosity is exploring. Mount Sharp, covered in sulfates, appears quite bright in this colorized, red-filtered image. To the far left, shrouded in a very dark shadow, was the south slope of Vera Rubin ridge, an elevation explored previously by Curiosity. Between the ridge and butte were tracks left by Curiosity’s wheels as they rolled forward, out of the scene. In the image foreground is, of course, humanity’s current eyes on Mars: the complex robotic rover Curiosity itself. Later this year, if all goes well, NASA will have another rover – and more eyes – on Mars. Today you can help determine the name of this rover yourself, but tomorrow is the last day to cast your vote.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200126.html

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Meet the Stars: Pollux

Meet the Stars: Pollux

Pollux may be a dying red giant star past its prime, but it’s not going through life all alone, for it has a planet to keep it company through ups and downs. Together with Castor, it resides in the constellation Gemini; Pollux is clearly the red-headed twin of the pair. And, not only does Pollux have a planet to keep it company, it also has a little puppy nearby, in the form of Canis Minor with…