AstroCal – November 2023 November will be a great month for those of you who like to see that bright gem of a planet Venus in the early morning hours. On the morning of November 9, it will be particularly interesting as our ‘twin planet’ will have a very close encounter with the Last […]
When I was a wee lad of maybe four, we visited my cousin Wally and his wife somewhere in Wisconsin or Minnesota. Being on the young side and a few years ahead of developing my fixation on maps and geography, the details are a bit fuzzy. The one thing that comes to mind with […]
Back in May of 2023, we covered the origins of Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band (5-3-23) a month before I had the opportunity to see the current version of the band in Eugene, Oregon. This FTV article explained how a thirty-year old promoter named David Fishof proposed an idea to Ringo. In 1989, Fishof asked […]
Greetings – things are taking shape – we are running our new transmitter at 88.5 at 50 watts until we get the new equipment bay here – due to arrive in Mid-October. Moving the electronics from the hard to reach upper shelf where they have been since our last remodel in 1998 will make things […]
With all the talk about Elon Musk’s desire to make humanity a ‘multi-planet species’, it makes me kind of wonder who, exactly, will be the first human to (as Musk’s t-shirt proclaims), ‘Occupy Mars’. True, the first attempt to launch his massive Starship was a mixed success; the Super Heavy booster B7 did fly […]
Let us check and see if we will be getting our traditional (and spooky) Full Moon for Halloween this year. Rats! As Maxwell Smart used to say on Get Smart!, “Missed it by that much.” The Full Moon on October 28 means it will still be bright on All Hallow’s Eve, so you still have a […]
In his Your Place in Space feature printed in The Planetary Report’s June Solstice 2023 edition, Bill Nye opened this special OSIRIS-REx issue with some reflections about the probe’s seven year journey. As the president of The Planetary Society, Nye wanted to remind all the Society’s members that, “You share in missions like OSIRIS-REx. […]
As my 70th birthday crept up on me in the fall of 2023, I started thinking about how time passes between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next. My 60 years spent as an student in public school (K-12), college (5 years including grad school) and teaching (43 years in […]
Start your observations for September in the eastern sky in the hours before sunrise. Venus and Jupiter will be easy to find shining at -4.8 and -2.5, respectively. They will be the brightest objects in the sky not counting the Full Moon and the Sun. Venus will be due east in the lower part […]
First, let me apologize in advance for how many times we are going to say ‘Thank You’ in this FTV. There are only so many words that can fit what happened to WOAS-FM 88.5 in the past five months but the most important two are ‘Thank You’. We would be remiss to not thank […]