NASA’s Space Shuttle program may be ending, but astronauts still face the challenge of spending long periods in space on the International Space Station (ISS) and future planetary missions.
Astronaut Sandy Magnus knows the rigors of working and working out in space. A mission specialist on the final shuttle mission, she also spent more than four […]

Ingredients: graham crackers, marshmallows, chocolate, SUN!
With the days getting longer until June 21 (the summer solstice), there’s plenty of sun for solar fun. One recipe for sweet solar success (now or this summer) is melting s’mores in a Solar Oven —no campfire needed!
A cardboard-box solar oven that you make yourself, placed in a very sunny […]

Ask Suzy Gurton, Education Manager at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, about hands-on astronomy, and you’ll be disabused of any notion that studying the cosmos need be a solely intellectual pursuit.
She’ll remind you that building your own telescope is very hands-on, as is experimenting with colored filters and simple spectroscopes to understand how images […]

When astronomer Isabel Hawkins was growing up in Argentina, an encyclopedia salesman showed up at the door one day with an illustrated book about the planets.
“There was this one picture of Jupiter” says Isabel, “floating in the blackness of space. It was that image, of this mysterious planet, this exotic world surrounded in blackness, that […]