Month: May 2023

The moon will rise in the sky today, but you won’t be able to see it. It’s the new moon, the first of four phases of the lunar cycle, which is not visible to us here on Earth.  Even though you can’t see it, it is a particularly special new moon today — a rare “black moon.” Black moons aren’t a technical astronomy term, but colloquially, they have two different definitions. The first is the second new moon of a calendar month. Because the lunar cycle is 29.5 days long, it almost…

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Refresh 2023-05-19T16:25:51.522Z Two days until Ax-2 launch The Axiom 2 (Ax-2) mission is set to launch at 5:37 p.m. EDT (2137 GMT) on May 21 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. And the crew of the mission can hardly contain their excitement ahead of the eight-day-long mission to the International Space Station (ISS).  Crew commander Peggy Whitson will be the first woman to lead a private space mission, following two commands of the ISS as a NASA astronaut. “We really feel like we’re prepared…

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Astronomers have completed a comprehensive examination of large asteroids that zoom near our planet, determining that Earth probably won’t be struck by such an object for at least 1,000 years.  You may not want to breathe a sigh of relief just yet, however: The newly completed catalog looks at near-Earth objects (NEOs) at least 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) wide and therefore doesn’t rule out strikes from smaller, yet still potentially dangerous, asteroids. The team behind the new research looked at the positions and orbits of known NEOs, as cataloged by…

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