Our nearest planet?
The BBC radio4 programme More or Less (broadcast weekly on Fridays; repeated on a Sunday) deals with claims involving numbers or statistics. Unusually, the episode broadcast on 11 January 2019 [...]
City light pollution could get worse
For the amateur astronomer in a city, the biggest obstacle is light pollution, mainly from street lighting. Until recently, most street lights were sodium discharge lamps, initially low pressure (LPS), but [...]
Are We Alone?
In 1961, Professor Frank Drake attempted to estimate the number of extra-terrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way with which we might come into contact by making several assumptions. The Drake [...]
The Big Bang: who first suggested it?
The phrase ‘Big Bang’ was coined in 1949 by astronomer Fred Hoyle as a label for a cosmological model of the universe, although one with which he happened to disagree. [...]
Why the Star of Bethlehem did not exist
Almost every Christmas an astronomer attempts to explain the Star of Bethlehem. The Sky at Night team did so in their programme broadcast on 2015 Dec 30. They concluded that [...]