Results tagged “astronomy”

The image above is a montage of eighty-six separate thirty-second exposures taken on Woodbine Beach in the early hours of Tuesday morning during the Leonid meteor shower. (Each image was loaded into Photoshop and blended with the images below it to build up the star trails and reveal the meteors.) Over the three-quarters of an hour it took to accumulate the photographs, the camera caught five meteors, enough to show how they radiate out from the constellation Leo—from which the shower gets its name. Away from the pollution of city lights, more meteors would have been visible.

The annual Leonid meteor shower will peak in intensity tonight and tomorrow night. This year's show promises to be an exceptionally spectacular one, by recent standards—but only for those who know how to hide from Toronto's countless jiggawatts of light pollution. Do you know where in the GTA to go in order to ensure that your night of neck-craning is not spent in vain? Torontoist does.

The great August Mars hoax is an annual tradition. Come summer, inboxes around the world start to fill with the same old messages claiming that on August 27, Mars will come so close to the Earth that it will appear as large as the full moon in the night sky. This year, the hoax itself has received a lot more attention than usual, which makes the University of Toronto Libraries Department's celebration of the "closest approach of Mars in recorded history" even more embarrassing (the error was fixed this afternoon).

Riding the rocket is a routine event for most of us, a mundane part of our daily schedules that doesn't get a whole lot of attention. But at least for the next month, some imaginative physicists want to take the edge off our collective tedium and sprinkle a bit of cosmic wonder through our otherwise boring commutes. This year is the International Year of Astronomy; to celebrate, a series of posters is going up on the TTC which aims to engage our curiosity about the very nature of the universe itself. The campaign is part of an initiative called CoolCosmos, and consists of five posters that offer whimsical tidbits of information about astronomy, couched in terms that those of us who never ventured past grade 11 physics can still understand. It’s an endearingly nerdy campaign, and the most compelling use of TTC ad space we’ve seen since Poetry on the Way got us pondering the merits of blank verse while stalled on Bathurst.

So, you may have noticed it snowed this weekend. If you don't believe us, go check out the Toronto Star's website, where nine out of ten local stories are about the snow, people dealing with the snow, and celebrities talking about the snow. Notably absent among them: the probable cause for all of this snow.

Or it will be tonight between 10:00 and 10:51 p.m., when there will be a total lunar eclipse over Toronto (and various other cities North America and Western Europe, but 10 p.m. is when it’s happening here).