Month: December 2021

Winter solstice 2021 brings the year’s longest night to Northern Hemisphere

NeRD

The winter solstice of 2021 occurs today (Dec. 21), marking the official beginning of winter in the Northern Hemisphere and it brings good news:  From tomorrow on, days will start getting longer again, taking us out of the darkness as we slowly head towards spring.  The winter solstice marks the moment in Earth‘s orbit around the sun when the planet’s South Pole is the most tilted towards the star. That means the Southern Hemisphere is receiving a lot of sunshine (and the start of its summer season) while the Northern…

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Best lenses for astrophotography

NeRD

Astrophotography is something you can do with a basic DSLR or mirrorless camera and its kit lens. Without one of the best lenses for astrophotography, however, your results might not be quite what you imagined and you’ll soon be looking around for upgrades. Once you’re ready for a new lens, apertures of f2.8 and wider are what you’re looking for, to let as much light reach your camera’s sensor as possible. If you’re serious about the hobby, investing in one of the best cameras for astrophotography is also a no-brainer…

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Best zoom lenses

NeRD

A zoom lens is one that allows you to adjust its focal length. They can be wide-angle, telephoto, or form the bridge between the two, but they’re all adjustable. The opposite to a zoom lens is a prime, and these lenses tend to offer faster apertures to make up for being stuck at a single focal length. Zooms are extremely versatile lenses, and just about every photographer has one or two in their kit alongside their best camera. The faster, or wider, your aperture (the lower the f-number) the more…

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Best cameras for photos and videos

NeRD

A truth, universally acknowledged, is that someone in possession of the need to take photographs must be in want of one of the best cameras. But which camera? There are so many on the market, each described by marketers as the pinnacle of human achievement, that it can be confusing, and hard to decide between them. Happily, we’re here to help with this list of the best cameras currently available. There are two main types of camera on the market once you come up out of the compact and smartphone…

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Weird quantum objects known as Q balls could explain why we exist

NeRD

One of the biggest cosmological mysteries is why the universe is made up of way more matter than antimatter, essentially why we exist. Now, a team of theoretical physicists says they know how to find the answer. All they need to do is detect the gravitational waves produced by bizarre quantum objects called Q balls.  Every kind of ordinary matter particle has an antimatter partner with opposing characteristics — and when matter interacts with antimatter, the two annihilate each other. That fact makes our existence a mystery, as cosmologists are pretty…

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Watch the first full trailer for the new ‘Halo’ TV series coming to Paramount Plus

NeRD

The first proper footage from the eagerly-awaited “Halo” TV series on Paramount Plus has arrived, the live-action adaptation of the famous first-person shooter Xbox games. One of the flagship franchises for Microsoft’s Xbox, “Halo” is a military-style, sci-fi/fantasy video game series that focuses on the experiences of Master Chief John-117, one of a group of super soldiers code-named Spartans, together with Cortana, his artificial intelligence companion. The original trilogy of games centers on an interstellar war between humanity and an alliance of aliens known as the Covenant. You can see…

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