This is also how sailors managed to navigate before GPS. As long as you know the date and time (of where you set off from) you can determine your longitude based on the position of the stars. Finding your latitude is easy, just see how far Polaris (the north star) is from the horizon… or Sigma Octanis if you’re in the superior hemisphere.

Hurray! We’re finally gonna’ learn some more constellations again! Sure, at this rate it will take about 50 years to get through all of them, but at least we’ll all be educated old people.

Anyone who’s played Kerbal Space Program knows that ‘don’t forget the parachute’ is the first rule of rocket science.

Hey! Happy 2018 everyone! If you’re reading this, you’ve probably broken your New Year’s Resolution already. On the plus side, there’s a lot to look forward to this year. In January, the first Falcon Heavy launch, which will be the biggest (current) rocket in the world. In July and August, the Hayabusa 2 and OSIRIS-REx spacecrafts arrive at their respective asteroids. New Horizons will reach its new target on New Years Day 2019. Plus there are lunar eclipses in January and July.

What Dini actually needs to learn is the word ‘kyouryuu’ (恐竜), which means ‘fear dragon’, and is how you say ‘dinosaur’ in Japanese.

Time dilation is a really trippy phenomenon that also occurs when you move really fast, which is the reason why astronauts after travelling in the ISS at 7km/second for 6 months come back down to Earth about 0.007 seconds younger than everyone else. That might sound like nothing, but for GPS satellites to work they have to know the exact time within nanoseconds, and so if they used the same clocks we use on Earth, the GPS would progressively get more and more inaccurate at a rate of 10km a day!