‘Ahsoka’ season 1 episode 7 review: Fast-paced action in the vein of Rebels ahead of the big finale

Whether you like the overall direction of the show or not, it’s hard to deny Ahsoka has been a surprising ride with a voice of its own. While the marketing suggested the new Dave Filoni-led series would essentially be a fifth season of Star Wars Rebels (but in live-action), the final result is more of a deeply spiritual expansion of the Star Wars universe’s stranger side alongside nimble adventures, something which culminated completely with last week’s fable-like chapter. Episode 7 is titled ‘Dreams and Madness’ and was directed by Geeta…

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Harvest moon 2023, the last supermoon of the year, kicks off fall stargazing on Sept. 29

This Friday’s full moon will be a somewhat special one in that it will carry the title of “Harvest Moon” for those living in the Northern Hemisphere.  The moon officially will turn full when it reaches a spot in the sky opposite (180-degrees) to the sun. This moment will occur on Friday (Sept. 29) at 09:57 Greenwich Time (or in the Eastern Time zone, just prior to moonset at 5:57 a.m.).  It also turns out that this full moon is the one that comes closest to the September equinox. In 2023,…

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Record-setting NASA astronaut lands with Russian crewmates after 1 year on space station

The first American to spend a full year in space and the first two Russians to do the same on the International Space Station (ISS) have landed safely back on Earth. NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin of the Russian federal space corporation Roscosmos returned from the space station aboard Russia’s Soyuz MS-23 spacecraft on Wednesday (Sept. 27). Their touchdown at 7:17 a.m. EDT (1117 GMT or 5:14 p.m. local time) on the steppe of Kazakhstan ended an extended 371-day stay in space for all…

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Learn the true stories of NASA’s 1st women astronauts in new book ‘The Six’ (exclusive)

 NASA changed forever in 1978 with the addition of new kinds of astronauts. That year, NASA accepted women and people of color into the astronaut corps for the first time, and the new book “The Six: The Untold Story of America’s First Women Astronauts” (Scribner, 2023) by Loren Grush shares the true firsthand stories of the female pioneers in that group. Grush’s book focuses on the stories of astronauts Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna Fisher, Kathy Sullivan, Shannon Lucid and Rhea Seddon, while also talking about the decades of discrimination…

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SpaceX flight-proven rocket hardware to go on display at Smithsonian

A SpaceX rocket engine that was used in the launch of an Israeli company’s first attempt at landing on the moon has now, itself, landed in the Smithsonian. It is one of the first examples of SpaceX hardware to represent the U.S. commercial spaceflight company in the national collection. The Merlin engine and a grid fin were donated by SpaceX to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “Two new artifacts from SpaceX‘s Falcon rocket have joined our collection,” the National Air and Space Museum posted to its…

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How our Milky Way galaxy would look in gravitational waves (video)

A simulated map of the Milky Way as it would appear in gravitational waves has given a powerful impression of what future space-based detectors will observe. Over 90 gravitational-wave events have been detected so far by the triumvirate of ground-based detectors — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the U.S., Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan. All these detected events are mergers of stellar-mass black holes and/or neutron stars in distant galaxies; no gravitational-wave events have been found coming from our Milky Way galaxy. However, our galaxy is…

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