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For over 2000 years, the Silk Road has been connecting the east and west world since the Han Dynasty. With its thousands of miles, the Silk Road became an important channel for politics, economy and culture exchanges between the Eastern and Western civilizations. The starry sky is the precious part of nature resources and important culture for human beings. All the people along the Silk Road share the same view of starry sky for all the time. In recent years, I was traveling along the Silk Road to capture the landmarks at night. Below are photos to show the colorful...
Writing about Astronomy is a special skill. Whether it's a scientific article or a piece of advice, it's not something just anybody can easily do. What does an amateur astronomer write about? Common topics are: what they like to observe, what equipment they like, what equipment they don't like, etc. – but all of these topics are beyond cliché. For me personally, these are just a few topics that have been in my head for a few years now as I became involved in outreach and bringing people into the hobby. No topic moves me quite like what's coming to...
The Moon is one amazing target when observed with a sturdy mounted telescope, capable to handle higher magnifications. One seems to hover over the lunar landscape, visually just a tad out of reach for it to be touched. I love to have a slow visual stroll near the terminator, the frontier between bright lunar day and dark night. It is an incomparable visual show of light and shadows, where craters, mountains and cracks in the surface produce the most astonishing sights. For me, this is the nearest I will ever get to an actual walk on the Moon. Since the...
A blind student once asked me how dark matter got its name. I told her that its matter, or stuff, that we don't yet understand and cannot see, and when astronomers can't see something they like to call it “dark.” As she chuckled I realized that this explanation must sound pretty silly to a student who does not see at all. “They should let me do the naming,” she said with a smile. “We'd have a lot of things named dark.” The funny thing about our Universe is that the inconceivably vast majority of it cannot be seen by humans,...
For those of us in astronomy, time travel is an everyday reality. Our telescopes constantly look to the sky and to the past, searching for clues to understand the universe. 2019 is a year of many milestones in astronomy, a good point to take pause and see where we are and how far we have come. A hundred years ago, a handful of countries came together towards the end of a destructive global war to formally establish the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Almost a century later, the whole world joined together to celebrate astronomy during the UNESCO International Year of...
