Morehouse’s Comet, Photographed In Stereograph In 1908 Or Shortly Thereafter. It Is Not Known Whether

The orbit of Jupiter protects the Earth from asteroids.

Possible 360° camera drone by Samsung?

I'm curious about the physics of bottle rockets. In the novel I'm writing, my characters use bottle rockets as weapons. They tape sharpened sticks to the rockets and use them as projectile spears. What would be the velocity of a bottle rocket with a stick taped to it? What kind of damage would it inflict? Love your blog! Thank you!

The final velocity depends on a lot of variables, like the trajectory, weight, fuel being used, burn rate of the fuel, size of the bottle, etc. However, you can be assured that they can be harmful and with the right pointy sticks, they can be deadly.

Here’s one example:

Good luck with your novel!

South Pole Telescope

H.J. Detouche’s 1754 painting depicting Galileo Galilei displaying his telescope to Leonardo Donato, Doge of Venice.

Maria Mitchell - Scientist of the Day

Maria Mitchell, an American astronomer, was born Aug. 1, 1818, in Nantucket. Mitchell was the first professional woman astronomer in the United States and a role model for generations of aspiring women scientists. She was trained by her father, a school-teacher, and had the extreme good fortune to discover a comet in 1847. Not only was she the first to see the comet, she also had the mathematical skill to calculate its orbit. Her feat won her an international gold medal from the Danish government, the first such recognition for any American woman, and eventually, the professorship of astronomy at Vassar College, also the first such position for any woman. (It is probably of interest to some of this reading audience that, before she became famous, Mitchell spent 17 years as a librarian on Nantucket.) Mitchell was admitted to various male bastions, such as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston (the only woman so honored until the 20th century), but she decided early on that, instead of trying to show men that women could be good scientists, she would spend her life showing young women that they could be good scientists. She seems to have done a superb job at this task, becoming a legendary teacher at Vassar. Antonia Maury, a noted astronomer at Harvard, was one of her pupils. The lovely albumen print portrait of Maria above is at Harvard.

In 1863, Matthew Vassar, the founder of Vassar College, personally commissioned a telescope for Mitchell from Henry Fitz, a well-known New York telescope builder. With a lense 12 inches in diameter, it was second among American telescopes only to the great refractor at Harvard (see second image above). The telescope is now in the National Museum of American History in Washington. Vassar also built an observatory for Maria; a period photo can be seen above, just below the Fitz refractor.

The small telescope that Mitchell used to discover the Nantucket comet is now mounted in her childhood home on Vestal Street (see last photo above), across from the headquarters of the Maria Mitchell Association, the group her descendants founded in 1908 to continue Mitchell’s lifelong passion for the natural sciences and science education.

Dr. William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City

Orion nebula & The running man nebula, by TimMorrill

Orion nebula & The running man nebula.

Inside - Vadim Sadovski