Hello,

I recently watched a video from one of Christopher Hitchens' debates (I wish I had discovered him earlier in life) where he talked about the Big Bang in a way that was very inspiring for me, although perhaps in a strange way. Anyway, he talked about some of the gloomy aspects of the event, such as where the universe is going, what will happen to our sun and our planet, etc. I say inspiring in strange ways because these ideas have helped me "let go" of some of my anxieties related to how humans treat the planet and each other, a serious struggle in life for me.

Can someone suggest a book that deals with the Big Bang in a way that doesn't go too deep into the extremely technical science piece, maybe a bit more in layman's terms? (I do have a degree in electrical engineering, so maybe not a complete dummy I hope)

I don't know if this is the best place to ask about this, but since I was little I have always liked space and I want to study it, I don't know which branch to choose. But to begin with, is it worth it?

What (if anything) are some issues that could cause a celestial body to appear as though it's flickering when observed through a Dobsonian telescope?

I live in south florida, and i rarely see the moon overhead... before I go to bed, I go out into the parking lot to have a cigarette around 1:30am - 2am, and i can go a month or 2 w/o seeing the moon overhead... i recently returned from visiting family in NY, and every clear night I could see the moon overhead at the same times... so why is it rare to see it over head? this is somewhat new as last year I could see the moon just about every night...

Well id like to start with planet 9 theories and stuff like that, since it is a possibility that it exists and orbits well somewhere i read 12k year or something like that and was wondering what are the visit times it made to earth

It's something I've always wondered, seeing as the rings are believed to have been from icy moons that collided, why did they spread across the width of the planet so uniformly? If the collision halted or sped up some debris, wouldn't they form a shape different from an oval? I'd like to know if anyone has the answer.

I was stargazing with a few friends the other night and had some questions I’m not sure how to find an answer to (though they might be dumb questions).

I’m aware that most everything visible to the naked eye is less than ~10^3 light years away. So when looking up at the sky, we can see stars across the whole sky 180° and they’re obviously located within our galaxy. So if I can see the Milky Way stretch across the sky, and I look in a direction orthogonal to the galactic plane, where are the stars that I’m seeing located exactly? Is the galaxy thick enough that there are enough stars above and below us (relative to the plane) to fill the sky?

Don’t be afraid of being too dense in answering, I’ll take as much information as you’d like to give me.

Spent last night while making an attempt to observe the aurora and saw a regular blink in the sky that was slowly moving, and I'm having a hard time guessing what it might have been. Observation location was roughly 48.609876° -122.426534°. It looked like an average star or satellite, and blinked on every 24 seconds, with each blink lasting maybe 100ms, with a sharp edge to the blink (i.e. not fading in/out, but sharply blinking on/off, similar to an airplane light.)

Via Stellarium's angle measurement tool and some references to stars we were observing, I'd estimate that it was moving about 0°5'30" every 24 seconds. It took several hours to travel from the neighborhood of Ursa Major to Bootes (about 60°).

In retrospect I should have more carefully paid attention to whether its path tracked with the stars or was fixed relative to the ground (i.e. orbital vs drifting in the jetstream), but my impression is that it was orbital.

Is this just a tumbling satellite glint? The question with that for me is that it was ~directly overhead during the middle of the night, and that it was moving so slowly.

What could it have been? Do weather balloons and the like ever have lights on them blinking at this kind of rate?

In Stellarium I found a few GPS satellites in the area but they move 2-3 times too fast and the tracks aren't quite right.

Thanks for any ideas!

When I was looking at the night sky yesterday I saw a very bright star with a slightly red circle around it with some red-ish “fog” between the star and the edge of the circle. Does anyone have any explanation for what this could possibly be? The circle itself, compared to the star, was barely visible.

Thanks.

I'm looking to get a good telescope that's fairly easy for use. I've had a Celestron AstroMaster 130EQ and I'm looking to get into astrophotography more. I know that it depends on budget but does anyone have any recommendations to focus on astrophotography and fairly easy to set up/travel with on occasion? Thanks!

Since we orbit around the galaxy how long will proxima be the closest star to earth? What other stars are projected to be nearer to us after that and in how long

I've been scrolling through all the possible apps that might give me a forecast of aurorae, persid showers, lunar eclipses etc. Can anybody recommend an app that covers everything I might see in the sky?

My eyesight for reading is not brilliant and there's an overwhelming amount of apps that do one or two forecasts but not everything.

I don't mind purchasing a single or two premium app/s. What does everyone else use?

I don't know enough about the effects of changes in solar activitiy but, because I noticed that today here in western Europe the sun seems hotter and brighter, I keep asking myself if this effect is just my impression and if it could be a noticeable effect by human perception.

I’m currently in a discussion about the possibility of habitable double planets and several people have said that it would be impossible for double planets to have life due to one side of each planet constantly being molten but how true is this?

Have read lots of Neil over the years but looking to check out some more authors, possibly something slightly more in depth than Tysons usual stuff. My problem is I don’t know what books are outdated in their information these days. I know most books will have basics down but are there any books that include more recent discoveries and theories as well? That or even older books that hold up and are more in depth. Neil is great but I’ve read so much of his stuff it starts to feel samey and basic at this point.

Does the sun now have atoms that were part of a human? Can distant stars now have atoms that were a part of humans? Can our atoms leave the earth and is there a limit on how far they can travel?

So this image comes from ESA's Rosetta spacecraft when it was making its final descent to comet 67P. It is from an altitude of 16 km, but it looks like its taken from the surface. Look at how huge those terrain features are! Sure, the comet is probably larger than I am assuming, but is there some kind of optical illusion going on? I don't understand how this was taken from such a high altitude. An altitude of 16 km on earth would absolutely not look like this.

https://preview.redd.it/d9x0exmp4qzc1.jpg?width=624&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=48e4dc54fcce66f0c014e02e93abd3e02e4cbc2a