Open Culture » Astronomy

In the observable universe, there are estimated to be between 200 billion to two trillion galaxies. By comparison to these super-Saganian numbers, the 383,620 galaxies captured by the Siena Galax...

https://www.openculture.com/2023/11/astronomers-create-a-digital-atlas-of-over-380000-galaxies.html

The USGS Astrogeology Science Center has recently released a series of colorful and intricately-detailed maps of Mars. These colorful maps, notes USGS, “provide highly detailed views of the su...

https://www.openculture.com/2023/01/behold-colorful-geologic-maps-of-mars-released-by-the-united-states-geological-survey.html

Everyone has been agog over the first photos from the James Webb telescope, and for good reason. “These images,” Rivka Galchin writes at The New Yorker, “carry news about the early universe...

https://www.openculture.com/2022/07/the-first-surviving-photograph-of-the-moon-1840.html

Late last year we featured the amazing engineering of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is now the largest optical telescope in space. Capable of registering phenomena older, more distant, a...

https://www.openculture.com/2022/07/the-first-photographs-taken-through-the-webb-telescope.html

When NASA spent close to a billion dollars on the Voyager program, launching a pair of probes from Cape Canaveral in 1977, its primary purpose was not to find intelligent extra-terrestrial life. ...

https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/how-to-decode-nasas-message-to-aliens.html

We’ve experienced some mindblowing technological advances in the years following designers Charles and Ray Eames’ 1977 film Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in...

https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/charles-and-ray-eames-powers-of-ten-updated-to-reflect-our-modern-understanding-of-the-universe.html

If you want to see the current height of technology, you could do worse than taking a look at the James Webb Space Telescope. Millions have been doing just that over the past few weeks, given tha...

https://www.openculture.com/2021/12/the-amazing-engineering-of-james-webb-telescope.html

The first photo of the moon was taken in 1850 by Louis Daguerre, from whom the daguerrotype gets its name. We have no idea what that first image looked like as it was lost in a studio fire. But t...

https://www.openculture.com/2021/09/the-brilliant-19th-century-astronomical-drawings-of-etienne-leopold-trouvelot.html

Astrobiologists can now extrapolate the evolutionary characteristics of possible alien life, should it exist, given the wealth of data available on interplanetary conditions. But our ideas about ...

https://www.openculture.com/2021/08/17th-century-scientist-gives-first-description-of-alien-life.html

A few years back, we highlighted a series of articles called The Matilda Effect — named for the feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose 1893 essay “Woman as an Inventor” inspired historians lik...

https://www.openculture.com/2021/08/jocelyn-bell-burnell-changed-astronomy-forever-her-ph-d-advisor-won-the-nobel-prize-for-it.html

There are those of us who, when presented with dueling starships in a movie or television show, always make the same objection: there’s no sound in outer space. In the short film above, this va...

https://www.openculture.com/2021/07/the-sounds-of-space-an-interplanetary-sonic-journey.html

There’s nothing like an ancient mystery, especially one as seemingly insoluble as the origins of “the world’s first computer,” the Antikythera mechanism. Discovered off the coast of the G...

https://www.openculture.com/2021/06/watch-an-accurate-reconstruction-of-the-worlds-oldest-computer-the-2200-year-old-antikythera-mechanism-from-start-to-finish.html

In the final, climactic scene of Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, the Milky Way engulfs the protagonist — an aesthete who keeps himself detached from the world, a universal...

https://www.openculture.com/2021/03/a-finnish-astrophotographer-spent-12-years-creating-a-1-7-gigapixel-panoramic-photo-of-the-entire-milky-way.html

What’s the world’s oldest computer? If you answered the 5‑ton, room-sized IBM Mark I, it’s a good guess, but you’d be off by a couple thousand years or so. The first known computer may ...

https://www.openculture.com/2021/03/researchers-develop-a-digital-model-of-the-2200-year-old-antikythera-mechanism-the-worlds-first-computer.html

Image via Wikimedia Commons As team names go, the Harvard Computers has kind of an oddball ring to it, but it’s far preferable to Pickering’s Harem, as the female scientists brought in un...

https://www.openculture.com/2021/03/the-little-known-female-scientists-who-mapped-400000-stars-over-a-century-ago-an-introduction-to-the-harvard-computers.html