Bad Astronomy Newsletter

Ooo, meta If all goes well today and tomorrow, this will be the last Bad Astronomy Newsletter issue I’ll be sending via Substack. <tl;dr: No action is required on your part; just sit back and relax and the BANs will continue to be sent to you, just through Beehiiv instead of Substack.> As you may be aware, Substack has a Nazi problem. They allow and even promote far-right hate on the platform, and when confronted on it they doubled down.

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Ooo, meta As y’all may know, after Substack went all-in on keeping Nazis on the platform, I have been considering my options. I’m in the process of moving this newsletter now, and hopefully will have it done in a few days. I want to stress that for you, the reader, the move will be almost completely transparent. In other words, your subscriptions will migrate over and you’ll keep getting newsletters as usual, so there’s nothing you need do.

Subscribe to Bad Astronomy Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

Subscribe to Bad Astronomy Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a description so you can grok it Colors can tell you a lot about an astronomical object. Turns out, they can tell us about ourselves, too. For example, Uranus is well known to be a greenish tint, caused by methane in its upper atmosphere. That gas absorbs red light from the Sun, reflecting away green and blue. There is also a haze layer in the giant planet’s atmosphere, muting the colors and giving Uranus an overall muted appearance.

Subscribe to Bad Astronomy Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

Subscribe to Bad Astronomy Newsletter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

Ooo, meta Wow, Issue 666! Quite a kilometerstone. You know what this means, right? When you’re 2/3rds of the way through reading this, you’ll be 2/3rds of the way to reading 1,000 issues! Assuming you’ve read the previous 665. Get thee to the archive. Besides the usual way people think of the number, 666 is interesting. Mathematically, it’s the sum of the first 36 natural numbers: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4… + 34 + 35 + 36 = 666.

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