Brian Ventrudo

Is the Universe Too Dangerous for Life?

August 15, 2019 by Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Science

Artist’s impression of a gamma ray burst hitting the Earth. The gamma rays would trigger changes in the Earth’s atmosphere that might make life as we know it impossible. Credit: NASA

It’s a question that inevitably arises in conversations about the cosmos: does life exist elsewhere in the universe?

For those who hope the answer is “yes”, the harvest of exoplanets by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and other telescopes over the past decade has been hugely encouraging. As of mid 2019, in the small slice of sky under its exacting gaze, analysis of Kepler’s measurements found more than two thousand extrasolar planets, and all telescopes have confirmed some 3,700 exoplanets. Extrapolating these results, astronomers estimate our Milky Way galaxy alone might hold some 10 billion planets that may have the temperature and composition to harbor habitable life. With that much real estate, many believe that complex or even intelligent life must have formed on at least some of these? [Read more…] about Is the Universe Too Dangerous for Life?

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See the ‘Craters of Apollo 11’

July 18, 2019 by Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Solar System

The astronaut Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin at Tranquility Base on July 20, 1969.

As the world celebrates the 50th anniversary of the still astonishing Apollo 11 moon landing, we backyard stargazers can also get in on the fun (indeed many of us grizzled amateur astronomers can trace our interest in the night sky to the space program of the 1960s). With a modest telescope and good seeing, nearly anyone with a little observing experience can see the region of the Moon where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin briefly walked, and observe the three tiny craters named for the two famous moonwalkers and their crew mate Michael Collins who remained alone in lunar orbit to pilot the Apollo 11 command module [Read more…] about See the ‘Craters of Apollo 11’

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Mammatus Clouds After Thunderstorms

July 7, 2019 by Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Atmospheric Sightings

Mammatus clouds passing over Calgary, Canada on July 6, 2019.

The summer ‘monsoons’ have obliterated the stars for the past couple of weeks and at least for one week more. But a good stargazer still needs to look up from time to time, which is how I found a formation of mammatus clouds passing overhead after an afternoon and evening of heavy thunderstorms near Calgary, Canada.

These ominous and distinctively shaped clouds are usually formed on the underside of anvil-shaped cumulonimbus clouds that cause severe thunderstorms. These sagging pouches are mostly made of ice crystals. An individual “pouch” can range anywhere from one to three kilometers in diameter, and a mammatus cloud field can stretch for dozens of kilometers across the sky.

Their formation is still poorly understood, but they may form from cold, dense air sinks toward the earth from higher up. This sinking air pokes through the bottom of the anvil resulting in the pouch-like appearance. So they may be a rare occurrence of cloud formation caused by sinking air rather than rising air. The cloud droplets and ice crystals eventually evaporate and the mammatus clouds dissipate. These clouds were passing quickly and moved over the horizon before they faded away.

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The Great ‘South American Eclipse’ of 2019

July 2, 2019 by Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Celestial Events

Observers in a narrow band across the southern Pacific Ocean and north-central Chile and Argentina enjoyed a rare spectacle today: a total solar eclipse. The lovely seaside towns of La Serena and Coquimbo, Chile, enjoyed two minutes and thirteen seconds of totality, and observers at some of the world’s great astronomical observatories got in on the fun. This is the first total solar eclipse visible anywhere since the ‘Great American Eclipse‘ of August 21, 2017. The next total solar eclipse occurs on December 14, 2020, once again across the South Pacific, Chile, and Argentina.

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The Poet Laureate of Stargazing

May 31, 2019 by Brian Ventrudo Filed Under: Stargazing

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great and good American poet, essayist, and humanist Walt Whitman. Sometimes called the ‘father of free verse’, Whitman was often beheld as the key to understanding America as it was in the promising days of late 19th century, after the Civil War. He was also, in my view, the poet laureate of stargazers everywhere, especially on account of two of his poems ‘When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer’ and ‘A Clear Midnight’, reproduced below for your reading pleasure.

“A Clear Midnight”
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes
thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Or enjoy the latter poem in the video format below (which is likely the only time you will ever see a video from ‘Breaking Bad’ on this website):

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