Then of course there is the infamous egg balancing myth, which says you can balance an egg on its end the day of the equinox. You can do this with a little care and luck, as you can see in the picture, but you can do this any day of the year as well.
In the Way
If you happen to be in the central New York area, say between Syracuse and New York City, if you watch Regulus around 2am Thursday morning you might see the star disappear for about 10 seconds.
How Astronomy Supports Evolution
If evolution is correct (and it is) then it must have occurred over billions of years, not a mere 10,000 or so. So how do we know — really, really know — that the Universe is billions of years old? It all comes down to a bit of astronomy.
Fixed Point
Quasars are both very bright and very distant. Because of this we can use them as reference points when determining the positions of astronomical objects.
Scale
When something is far way, it can look quite small. That is why the resolving power of your instrument is so important.
Great Attractor
There a region of space about 150 million light years away that is gravitationally attracting the galaxies in its region, including ours. It is known as the great attractor, and we’re not entirely sure what’s there. The problem is it happens to lie in the direction of the zone of avoidance, so our own galaxy is blocking our view.
Zone of Avoidance
Our location within the Milky Way means that our view of the cosmos is somewhat obscured. One way we deal with this is by defining a zone of avoidance.
Synthetic Tracking
A recent paper in the Astrophysical Journal presents a new method that could make finding smaller meteors easier. Instead of using long exposures to look for meteor trails, the method uses a series of short exposures and some computational power to produce synthetic tracking.
Here and There
When Isaac Newton proposed his universal law of gravity, he was actually making a rather bold claim, specifically that the distant stars and planets are governed by the same physical laws that govern the Earth. This was a radical split from the traditional Aristotelian view that the heavens were fundamentally different from terrestrial physics.