Nigel Hey's Blog, page 4

Stonehenge awaits latter-day Druids' big event at June 20-21 summer solstice

Stonehenge at summer solstice. Photo: English Heritage
Thousands of people will trek to Stonehenge to celebrate Summer Solstice this year, even more than usual because it is on a weekend. Many celebrants will arrive as early as 7 p..m. on Friday, June 20, and stay overnight on their blankets (no camping equipment or chairs allowed) until the Sun makes its appearance at 4:52 the next morning. There may be no visible sunrise if it's cloudy, as was the case last year, but you can be sure the...

Stonehenge awaits latter-day Druids' big event at summer solstice June 20-21

Stonehenge at summer solstice. Photo: English Heritage
Thousands of people will trek to Stonehenge to celebrate Summer Solstice this year, even more than usual because it is on a weekend. Many celebrants will arrive as early as 7 p..m. on Friday, June 20, and stay overnight on their blankets (no camping equipment or chairs allowed) until the Sun makes its appearance at 4:52 the next morning. There may be no visible sunrise if it's cloudy, as was the case last year, but you can be sure the...

Time Travel: When Tigers Terrorized the American Southwest

Stone samples stacked beside a lateral Blackwater Draw dig.
Photo: Eastern New Mexico UniversityBlackwater Draw sits on a time warp. Located in a remote landscape where central New Mexico threatens to bump into Texas, it is near the dozens of great green clustered tiddlywinks that I had seen often from the air. Up close they were amazing disks of tall, healthy corn and milo grain, watered by huge irrigating arms that moved slowly around the field from a central pivot like the hands of a clock...

Beryl Markham, first person to fly solo from England to America

West with the Night , by Beryl Markham, is a rip-roaring, classic adventure memoir, often overlooked yet accompanied by a mystery that holds both Markham and her book in its grip.The book began by confronting me with a delicious shock in time and space. I was transported to the Kenyan outback of a hundred years ago, where a skinny, straw-blonde and amazingly gutsy, daring eight-year-old is pursuing adventure with her native friends and her indomitable, brave, battle-scarred, faithful and impre...

Fake churches, living fossils, and prairie-dog impersonators in London's suburbs

Snowdrops. Image: Capel Manor College and Gardens
If you have the urge to spend a different kind of pleasant afternoon in London, you could do a lot worse than visit the site of my daughter’s once-a-week college classes at Enfield, on the Cambridge road north of the city. This is the 30-acre home of a medieval abbey that is no such thing, a score of typical English gardens, and even a family of South African animals that act like prairie dogs but would die on a vegetarian diet. It’s a fascinat...

Why Should People Explore Mars in Person?



Irregular slabs of petrified mud at Yellowknife Bay, Mars. Photo: NASA
I got frustrated with myself after re-reading my January post on human space exploration. Why? Halfway through it I talked myself out of most of my reservations about setting up a human colony on Mars.

Most of my readers favored colonization, but for different reasons. One took the Edmund Hillary viewpoint and argued that people need to explore the solar system in person “Because it’s there!” Another sided with...

Why Should People Explore Mars in Person? Because It's There!



Irregular slabs of petrified mud at Yellowknife Bay, Mars. Photo: NASA
I grew impatient with myself after re-reading my January post on human space exploration because midway I argued myself out of most of my reservations about setting up a human colony on Mars.

One reader argued that people need to explore the solar system in person “Because it’s there!” Another sided with Craig Venter’s idea of converting genetic information into digital information and launching encapsulated see...

Why Mars? Because It's There!



Irregular slabs of petrified mud at Yellowknife Bay, Mars. Photo: NASAI got impatient with myself after re-reading my January post on human space exploration because midway I argued myself out of my skepticism for the idea of setting up a human colony on Mars. 

One reader argued that people need to explore the solar system in person “Because it’s there!” Another sided with Craig Venter’s idea of converting genetic information into digital information and launching encapsulat...

Over the moon, and how we'll get there

SpaceX "Dragon" vehicle with cargo from Earth berthed at International
Space Station. Photo: NASA
Often when we meet, Harry manages to put in a plug for the colonization of Mars. I used to kick myself for telling him that I was writing another book about the solar system, causing him to assume that I am a Mars fellow traveller. “I can’t imagine why, after our success with Project Apollo, we just didn’t follow it up with a manned mission to Mars,” he says, shaking his head unhappily. “...

The Rebirth of Rosetta and and the Great Cometary Piggy-Back Ride

Artist’s impression of the Rosetta lander in place on Comet
Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Image: ESA
You wouldn't remember this now, but readers who picked up a copy of Smithsonian magazine exactly 11 years ago may have noticed my article “All Aboard for Comet Wirtanen,” In brief this explained how and why the spacecraft Rosetta would rendezvous with this particular chunk of space debris. I did a fair amount of mumbling and grumbling to myself as the article went through the editing process prio...