It's good to feel small

Why the size of the Universe doesn't bother me—and shouldn't bother you, either

My first year teaching astronomy at a Christian liberal arts university, I gave my students a questionnaire asking what major concerns they had about the subject. I expected…

The evidence very strongly points to the Earth and the Universe being quite old.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss the evidence or the reasoning behind that conclusion. But one defense I think makes no sense at all biblically is the one that says God made the world look…

I love star clusters. They're sometimes spectacular, sometimes kind of ordinary like this one. I don't even know which star cluster this is – it was just saved in a folder full of astronomy images on my laptop.

But there is something that is like balm for my heart when I look at…

Y'all

I live in a prime location for viewing the 2024 total solar eclipse here in central Texas. I'll be attending an all-out event that's expected to draw thousands of people. As one of the on-location astronomers, I'll be there to answer questions and talk to the general public.…

The startling Helix Nebula, a planetary nebula in the constellation Aquarius.

A planetary nebula is the last gasp of a lower-mass star that has puffed off its tenuous outer layers. You can see the exposed core of the star as a small white dot in the center of the nebula.…

I'm writing a science-based devotional

A collection of love-letters to Jesus from an astrophysicist

Astronomy is the oldest science in the world, and for good reason. Night after night, for as long as humans have existed in the world, we have had the entire natural laboratory…

A solar system object a day for the month of February.

Today it's trusty, rusty Mars.

Mars was one of the first objects to capture the imagination of astronomers. It's a near neighbor, inviting close observation of its red surface, which is the result of iron oxide (rust) in…

Why haven't we returned to the Moon?

I had a family friend who was an Apollo engineer in the 1960s and 1970s. He explained that the reason we haven't gone back to the Moon is that there's no reason to do it (yet).

Going to the Moon takes a huge amount of money and manpower. The…

A solar system object a day for the month of February.

This is our Moon, my absolute favorite celestial object.

Often overlooked by ambitious perusers of the night sky, it's a treasure-trove of detail with its many craters, mountains, and lava flows (maria), seen by us in…

A solar system object a day for the month of February.

This is Saturn, one of my personal faves.

The sixth planet from the Sun, Saturn is best known for its extensive ring structure. It's about 10 times larger and 100 times more massive than the Earth.

This stunning portrait…

A solar system object a day* for the month of February.

Here's one of my favorites: Jupiter.

Jupiter, one of the first objects to be viewed through a telescope, is host to 90+ moons, but it is the four largest – the Galilean moons – that not only helped to usher in the…

Is the truth about creation hard or easy to understand?

(Yes.)

How much effort a person has to make to understand the scientific truth about God’s creation depends on two things. First, if someone wants to understand just for himself, the truth is really simple: the opening…

A solar system object a day for the month of February.

This is comet 103P/Hartley, or rather its nucleus. Discovered in 1986, it has a relatively short orbital period of 6.5 years and is about 1.5 km long.

This comet is one of the few that has been visited by spacecraft – in…

How the worst characters in sci-fi help me deal with the problem of evil

One question I’m asked over and over by atheists is why God allows evil and suffering. Why doesn’t God intervene in the human course of things more than he apparently does?

Without a good explanation,…