Fraser Cain

Okay, if you’ve got some spare time, check out this amazing website called Stuff in Space. It’s a simulation of every satellite (alive or dead), space station, and large piece of space junk orbiting the Earth right now. You can zoom in and out, rotate the Earth and its satellites around. Pick any one object … Continue reading “This is the COOLEST! Everything that’s Orbiting the Earth Right Now”

The Universe Today Ultimate Guide to Viewing the Cosmos is our practical book on how to get into astronomy, written by David Dickinson with Fraser Cain. It's filled with everything you need to become an amateur astronomer, with hundreds of photographs taken by other amateurs.

The Solar System is a really big place, and it takes forever to travel from world to world with traditional chemical rockets. But one technique, developed back in the 1960s might provide a way to dramatically shorten our travel times: nuclear rockets. Of course, launching a rocket powered by radioactive material has its own risks … Continue reading "Earth To Mars In 100 Days? The Power Of Nuclear Rockets"

As NASA prepares to return to the Moon by 2024 as part of its Artemis program, the agency is focusing its efforts on exploring the Moon’s polar regions. These are areas of the Moon which seem to have a lot of water mixed in with the regolith. Some of these craters are permanently in shadow, … Continue reading "Why Is The Moon’s South Pole So Important? It’s All About Water"

It’s amazing to think there are telescopes up in space, right now, directing their gaze at distant objects for hours, days and even weeks. Providing a point of view so stable and accurate that we can learn details about galaxies, exoplanets and more. And then, when the time is up, the spacecraft can shift its … Continue reading "Spacecraft Gyroscopes And Reaction Wheels. You Can Never Have Enough"

Humans to Mars. That’s the plan right? The problem is that sending humans down to the surface of Mars is one of the most complicated and ambitious goals that we can attempt. It’s a huge step to go from low Earth orbit, then lunar landings, and then all the way to Mars, a journey of … Continue reading "Want To Explore Mars? Send Humans To The Moons Of Mars First: Phobos And Deimos"

I’ve said many times in the past that the Earth is the best planet in the Universe. No matter where we go, we’ll never find a planet that’s a better home to Earth life than Earth. Of course, that’s because we, and all other Earth life evolved in this environment. Evolution adapted us to this … Continue reading "Better Than Earth? Are There Superhabitable Worlds In The Milky Way?"

Near the end of 2019, astronomers watching the red giant Betelgeuse noted how much the star had dimmed, continuing to steadily fade for months.  It’s a variable star, and it’s known to get dimmer and brighter, but the big surprise is that it’s still continuing to dim, recently passing magnitude 1.56 and still getting dimmer. … Continue reading "Betelgeuse Is Still Dimming! And We Have the Pictures to Prove It"

My Dad’s a pretty good woodworker, and recently completed a wooden table that looks surprisingly like Jupiter, Great Red Spot, atmospheric bands and all. Here’s the original table from a bit of a side angle: And here’s what it looks like when it’s orbiting the Sun, imaged by Juno during a recent flyby. Check out … Continue reading "My Dad Made a Table That Looks Surprisingly Like Jupiter"

As soon as I saw these new artificial intelligence image creation tools, like DALL-E, I wanted to see how well they’d work for generating space and astronomy images. I’m still on the waiting list for DALL-E 2, so I don’t have any feedback to give there, but I signed up for Midjourney AI, played arou…