Skywatching
Dust in the Martian wind
One of the most fascinating videos sent back by the Curiosity rover, currently exploring the surface of Mars, shows a number of dust storms marching across the...
Lights in the sky
One night, some years ago I had a phone call from a rather worried-sounding man. He lived a few kilometres to the north of where I live. He said that his...
Signs of life
In the shallow waters of Shark Bay, Australia are strange, mushroom-shaped rocks, called stromatolites. These are produced by living creatures. Millions of...
Little green men
In 1967, Cambridge graduate student Jocelyn Bell was investigating how the solar wind makes distant radio sources twinkle. These observations can tell us how...
Size matters in telescopes
During the last two or three decades, the progress made in development of new astronomical instrumentation has been nothing short of stunning. We can make...
The northern lights
My very first encounter with an aurora was in England, before I came to Canada, at the house of a radio amateur. He was communicating by sending shortwave...
Interstellar visitors
Last year, an asteroid from interstellar space flew through our Solar System and is now on its way back out into the space between the stars. Now, astronomers...
Solar flares
The Sun has many times demonstrated its power to disrupt our power, communication and transportation infrastructure, and to cause problems for many aspects of...
Another near miss
By the time you read this, asteroid 2010 WC9 will have passed the Earth at around 12.8 kilometres a second (46,000 kilometres an hour), at a distance of roughly...
Fly me to the moon
This is the first time I have had the opportunity to squeeze one of my favourite jazz titles into an astronomy article. Considering the rigours of the journey...
Cosmic collisions
All telescopes on Earth are limited to seeing what the atmosphere lets through. For looking at short-wavelength radio waves — millimetre waves, we choose...