On August 26-27, 1883, a small island in the Indian Ocean obliterated itself in one of the most notorious volcanic eruptions in history. Krakatau (often spelled Krakatoa) erupted with such violence that two-thirds of the island, about 23 square kilometers, sank into the Sunda Strait. The explosions heard in the 1883 eruption remain the loudest […]
Category Archives: Space Exploration
Will we ever visit other stars?
Is it possible for humanity to visit other stars (or other stars that have planets, actually) in the future? Earth is our one and only home. As Carl Sagan said (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space), “On Earth, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every […]
Amazing supermoon photos from the ISS
August 10, 2014, was the closest, brightest supermoon of this year. A Russian cosmonaut, Oleg Artemyev aboard the International Space Station (ISS) took wonderful photos of this great astronomical event while the moon was setting.
Pale Blue Dot
The farthest spacecraft from Earth, NASA’s Voyager 1 Notes 1 probe took a photo of planet Earth in 1990, from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40 AU Notes 2) from Earth. The photo is known as the Pale Blue Dot. In the photograph, Earth is shown as a fraction […]
