Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. — Arthur Ashe (1943 – 1993) These words from tennis great Arthur Ashe have become a true mantra for me, and not just because he and I have the same hometown. There are objects in the night sky that I long to see…
“All good things come to those who wait,” the saying goes, according to a variation of Mary Montgomerie Lamb’s wisdom. And, gosh, I sure hope this is true. We’re still waiting for the Blaze Star to do its thing. The recurrent nova of T Coronae Borealis brightens from about magnitude 10 to magnitude 2 roughly…
My brain gets sticky sometimes. It likes having a problem to solve, and sometimes, especially when I’m feeling stressed, it will start inventing solutions to problems I don’t truly have. Case in point: My brain somehow became convinced recently that I am in fairly urgent need of a travel wrap, even though I have no…
We lost our cat, Pierre, last week after a rapid and devastating illness. I’d been searching for some parallel I could draw between the death of a star and the loss of an animal companion, but it’s a forced metaphor and I’m not feeling particularly clever. In considering stellar life cycles, I found a similarity…
One recent morning, I awoke determined to do something positive with the day. The world is a shitshow garbage fire, worsening by the hour. External and internal factors seem to be getting more challenging, too. But I knew I could do one small thing, one tiny thing, to make the world a slightly better place….
I have a favorite star. Maybe, as an amateur astronomer, I’m expected to value all stars equally, but I don’t. While I enjoy any available star field, Antares holds a special place for me. Over on Sky & Telescope a few years ago, I wrote about why I always look forward to the return of…
The past couple of weeks have been particularly stressful and precipitated a delay in my posting. The dysregulation that hit me wasn’t due solely to a single event or circumstance, but one big factor brought about the most intense anxiety I have ever felt, truly — and that’s saying a lot. I was kind to…
