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GAM 2018 Blog
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Eclipsed Moon and the Trisul Peak
By Ajay Talwar Recently the media has gone ga-ga over the ‘Super Blue Blood Moon'. In the days before the eclipse, the media frenzy was climbing higher and higher in India. I personally abhor the term Blood Moon. It's an eclipse, turns red due to well-known reasons and if seen from a dark location, is of a beautiful colour, nothing to do with blood. Astrologers in India garnered a lot of attention and money by fooling people with dire consequences using this opportunity, as always and helped by the media having the same purpose. The juxtaposition of astrologers and electronic...
Of Stars and Men
By Hatim Madani TRAPPIST-1 system. Credit: NASA Astronomical research is currently focused on the quest for extra-terrestrial life, and unless we discover life on the satellites of some of our planets, it is outside the solar system that we will have to look for traces of life. The discovery in 2017 of the Trappist-1 system hosting seven telluric planets, which was the result of the remarkable work of researchers from many nations among which Morocco (Pr Zouhair Benkhaldoun and the Oukaiemeden observatory's team); constitutes a historical discovery that rekindled the hopes of detecting extra-terrestrial life. This noble quest driven by...
Preserve your Natural Heritage: Measure Sky Brightness on Moonless Evenings with Globe at Night Citizen-Science
By Connie Walker Citizen-science is a rewardingly inclusive way to bring awareness to the public on the disappearance of the starry night sky, its cause and solutions. Globe at Night (GaN) encourages citizen-scientists worldwide to record the brightness of the night sky. During ten-days per month of moonless evenings, children and adults match the appearance of a specific constellation with 7 star maps of progressively fainter stars found at www.globeatnight.org. (Moonless evenings are chosen to avoid having a natural light bulb in the night sky when taking measurements.) People then submit their choice of star map in-situ using the “webapp”...
Why We Need the Moon
By Tilly Evans What's so special about the moon? It's a ball of rock orbiting around our slightly bigger rock whizzing around the Sun – so why is it so important to us? We may not consider the effects the moon has on our planet, but without them, life may not have evolved as we know it today. When you look up on a clear night you can see the moon's craters, these craters could have been craters on Earth but instead, the impacts were diverted by the moon's gravity. The moon acted as our protector over the years, shielding...
Experiments on the Moon
By Tom Gordon Think like an astronaut It's been said that the first people to set foot on Mars have already been born. Whether you like it or not, it doesn't really matter, because it's probably true, so we should probably start getting used to the idea. In addition, designs and plans to go back to the moon for long-term lunar base missions have already started. The new space race is upon us and the best way to prepare ourselves, is to behave like it has already happened and start doing some experiments as if we're already there, because before...
