Below is the night sky at Cerro Tololo, including the Galactic plane and the zodiacal light, which is sunlight scattered off interplanetary dust between the Earth and the Sun. (Image by Roger Smith.)
Autobiographical memoir (last updated October 16, 2022)
Astronomy 101 (Basic Astronomy), fall 2020
Advice for seniors in high school
Right Ascension and Declination of the Sun for 2024
Solar eclipses from 1901 through 2053
Right Ascension and Declination of the Moon for 2024
Lunar eclipses from 1901 through 2051
At what distance can the human eye detect a candle flame? It is NOT 10 miles or 30 miles, something you might get from a Google search. A paper by Kevin Krisciunas and Don Carona posted to the astrophysics preprint server can be obtained by clicking here .
Experiment to measure the distance to asteroid 1996 HW1
Experiments related to the Moon's angular size
Doing aperture photometry with IRAF
The cosmological distance ladder
How to integrate Planck's function (which involves calculating the Riemann Zeta Function)
Look-back time, the age of the universe, and the case for a positive cosmological constant (an article published in 1993 in the Journal of the RAS of Canada).
The acceleration of the universe
Strange cases from the files of astronomical sociology
My most famous joke (?) can be found here , and probably at various other places on the web.
Second Mitchell Institute Workshop on Cosmology and Supernovae, 12-14 April 2012
Third Mitchell Institute Workshop on Cosmology and Supernovae, 9-11 April 2013
Carnegie SN Project Workshop, October 2013
Tenth Mitchell Institute Workshop on Cosmology and Supernovae, 11-15 March 2019
This is an image of the burn-up of a Space Shuttle fuel tank, just south of the Big Island. It was taken at the 9200-ft level of Mauna Kea by William Albrecht in April of 1984. The view is to the southeast.
Last modified on January 5, 2024.
Please address any comments to: krisciunas@physics.tamu.edu