The largest meteor shower of this year is occurring now.  Above is an extraordinary  photo of the Perseid meteor shower on 12August2021 by Josh Drur y ( right ) over Stonehenge.  You also see our Milky Way.  The Perseids, associated with the Swift-Tuttle comet, started Monday morning and will continue for up to five nights.  The best time to watch is near dawn before there is any kind of sunlight.   However, the best night was the first one, partly because of Moon conditions.  From all indications, not worth a bother watching the Perseids anymore this year. These flaming particles burn up by the time they get as close as 50 miles from the Earth's surface. Note that this comet has a 133-year orbit, and what you see is the leftover particles from previous visits. John Denver's song  Rocky Mountain High  makes reference to this shower. Almost all meteor showers are associated with a passing comet or asteroid, and some are named after...

Today, no politics, no wars, no Trump.  All space science, for astronomers found what may be the Universe's brightest object in the sky,  J0529-4351 , and it's humongous. Out there 12 billion light-years away is a quasar with a black hole at its heart, growing so fast that it swallows the equivalent of a Sun a day. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles. From your early science courses you must remember that the Sun is 92 million miles from us. A light year ( which is a unit of length ) is equivalent to doing 31,500 round trips to the sun. Thus, you would need to do that 12 billion times to get to J0529-4351. This quasar shines 500 trillion times brighter than our Sun.   That black hole powering that quasar is more than 17 billion times more immense than our Sun.  But there are bigger ones, for at the center of the galaxy cluster Abell 1201 is a black hole equivalent to 30 billion Suns. This is the most violent place in our Universe. Age?  Began to form not lon...

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