My view for the next few months…
There. I said it.
One sure way to carry through with an intended goal, is to announce it to the world. Tell no one, and you always have a viable way out. In a way, keeping something under wraps can doom a project to failure. Hey, I finally quit smoking this way, way back in 1995. tell the world, and they’ll immediately know if you didn’t carry through.
Haven’t we written several science fiction books already? Yup… but the forthcoming project is something much larger in scope: our very first adventure into non-fiction.
Long time readers might recall our yearly roundup of astronomical events to watch out for in the coming year. This started way back when in 2009 on this blog, and migrated over to Universe Today in 2014.
It has grown in size and scope, and now, we’re taking it to the next logical step. We’re expanding this into The Top 101 Astronomical Events for 2017. Each event will get a one to two page entry, and the guide will be interspersed with factoids, tidbits, and tales of astronomical lore. This will be released first as an e-guide from Universe Today, and then as a download available from Amazon.
This, of course, is an experiment. If the demand reaches a certain threshold, this may become a yearly thing. I actually started doing this sort of list for myself, as a sort of outline on upcoming astronomy events to write about in the coming year. We also noticed that, while there are some amazing guides to, and almanacs for the coming year out there, none of them have really made the transition to digital. All this info is indeed out there on ye ole web, it’s just in disparate places. Most online guides we’ve come across on blogs and websites tend to treat astronomy in the coming year very superficially, in a standard ‘Top 10′ listicle format.
We’re looking to tie all of the ‘best of the best’ in one deep-diving handbook. Expect astronomical weirdness, and facts galore. What we don’t want to write is a simple basic learners book, nor will this be a laundry list of Moon phases in a standard almanac style. We’re aiming to make this something special, something in between. We’re incorporating tips, comments and suggestions from previous years, and we have some ideas for expansion (especially in the graphics department) if there proves to be a demand for this guide.
In previous years, we’ve even manged to include the list in Ical/Google Calendar format, and we’re hoping to do so again this year. Hopefully, this will be a resource you can download to your Ipad, smartphone, or viewing device of choice for use in the field.
It’ll be an eye-crosser to construct, for sure, but we hope to chronicle the creation process here over the next few months. And hey… we’re putting this all together whilst on the road traveling, using our 13.5” screen laptop.
Onward towards 2017, and another great year in astronomy.
The Universe: Fine-Tuned, or Just Fine Without Us?
Probing the universe… or is it the other way around?
It’s a chicken and egg question that comes around every so often in cosmology.
Were we created to live in the Universe, or was the cosmos fine-tuned for us? That is, was everything we see arranged just so we had to arise?
We’re currently reading Beyond Biocentrism, a book posing this very idea, repackaged in a slightly new way. This is known as the anthropic principle, an idea that rears its ugly head every so often. [Read more...]