Comet Shapes And Characteristics From A Chinese Silk Book (Boshu) Written During The Han Dynasty (206

Sorry, Tumblr, but Seth found his new favorite social network to reach fans: Ham radio.

What are comets made of?

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

Welcome to Jupiter.

ANNOUNCER at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, upon the entry of the Juno spacecraft into orbit around the largest planet in the solar system.  Juno, a solar-powered probe, will now conduct a 20-month investigation of the Jovian giant.

Fuck yeah human beings.

(via the Guardian)

Jupiter and beyond the Infinite…

Researchers confirm that mysterious radio waves are actually coming from outer space

The truth is out there — somewhere. Researchers at the Australian National University’s Swinburne University of Technology have confirmed that short bursts of radio waves that had stumped astronomers since their discovery are actually coming from far, far beyond Earth.

The Fast Radio Bursts, or short, intense pulses of radio light, were first picked up at Australia’s Parkes Observatory nearly 10 years ago, according to a statement released Monday by the Swinburne University of Technology. 

According to researchers, the FRBs are “about a billion times more luminous” than anything that’s been observed within our own galaxy.But for a long time, scientists couldn’t determine from where, exactly, the bursts were originating. Read more. (4/4/2017 10:03 AM)

Starry Night,

Vincent Van Gogh

What a stunner! See Jupiter’s southern hemisphere in beautiful detail in this new citizen-scientist-processed JunoCam image.