Little Astronomy

Most “celestial baby name” lists make boys an afterthought. You scroll past Luna, Stella, and Aurora for three screens before you hit a short paragraph of boy names tacked on at the bottom. This isn’t that. Every name here is a star name for boys, sorted by why it’s a star name, because “Orion” and “Caelum” belong to different decisions. One is a hunter striding across the wi...

Before any human set foot on the Moon, seven robots had to prove it wouldn’t swallow them. That was the Surveyor program’s job. Between 1966 and 1968, NASA fired seven robotic landers at the lunar surface to answer one terrifying, very practical question: if you set a heavy spacecraft down on the Moon, does it stay on top of the dust, or does it sink out of sight? The Surveyo...

“Types of moons” is one of those searches that means three completely different things depending on who’s typing it. Some people want the eight phases the Moon cycles through every month. Some want the special full moons with names — Blood Moon, Blue Moon, Supermoon, Harvest Moon. And a few mean the actual moons, plural, orbiting other planets: the 274 around Saturn, the icy ...

About a third of the planets we’ve found orbiting other stars don’t exist in our solar system at all. They’re bigger than Earth, smaller than Neptune, and sitting in a size gap that the eight planets next door simply skip. We call them super-Earths, and they’re probably the most common type of planet in the galaxy. That’s the strange part. The most abundant planet design in t...

Most lists of Colorado observatories just dump seven research facilities into a table and call it a day. Useful if you’re writing a term paper. Useless if you want to actually look through a telescope on a Tuesday night. Half those facilities are locked behind a university physics department or sit on a mountaintop you can’t drive to. So this is the other list. These are the ...