Little Astronomy

If you want one name that reads as strong, easy to say, and not overplayed: Orion. If you want something quieter that almost nobody else in the daycare class will have: Alkaid, Elio, or Norma (yes, it works for a boy — more on that below). Skip Apollo and Atlas if you’re hoping for rare; both have climbed hard in U.S. naming data over the past five years and are now firmly ma...

Most star names in use today trace back to Arabic astronomers who catalogued the sky a thousand years before telescopes existed — that’s why so many, like Betelgeuse and Aldebaran, start with “Al.” The brightest star in Earth’s night sky is Sirius, the “Scorcher,” and the most mythologically loaded is probably Betelgeuse, Orion’s shoulder and a star so large it would swallow ...

Kansas doesn’t get much credit as a spacefaring state. No launch pads, no mission control, just a lot of wheat fields and wide sky. And yet the state has quietly produced a disproportionate number of people who left the atmosphere entirely — Apollo command module pilots, shuttle commanders, a Space Force astronaut who came home from the ISS this year, and a man who trained fo...

Missouri isn’t the first state that comes to mind for astronomy, and that’s exactly why the observatories here don’t feel overrun. No ticket lotteries, no three-month waitlists — just a handful of university-run domes, a planetarium, and a scattered network of amateur clubs that open their gates on clear nights and let you look up. Most of what’s public runs through the state...

The Space Shuttle program flew 135 missions between 1981 and 2011, using five orbiters (Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour) to put the first reusable American spacecraft into orbit. Two of those missions ended in the loss of the crew — Challenger in 1986, Columbia in 2003 — and both changed how NASA managed risk. The rest built the Hubble Space Telescope’s c...