Posts by

Deborah Byrd

Meteor over Hidden Lake, Montana

The road into the heart of Glacier National Park in Montana is called Going-to-the-Sun Road. Here's a night sky photo over the park's Hidden Lake.

Deborah Byrd

September 25, 2016

Star trails at Giant Magellan Telescope site

When completed in 2025, the Giant Magellan super-scope in Chile is expected to have a resolving power 10 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Deborah Byrd

September 24, 2016

Dwarf galaxies and dark matter update

Standard cosmology calls for many more dwarf galaxies than we see. A new computer simulation suggests we might not need so many dwarf galaxies, after all.

Deborah Byrd

September 21, 2016

Wildfires in Siberia

2016 has been a bad year for wildfires in the forests of eastern Russia, too.

Deborah Byrd

September 20, 2016

Twin jets pinpoint active galaxy’s heart

The supermassive black hole at the heart of NGC 1052 is now the most precisely located supermassive black hole in the universe … almost.

Deborah Byrd

September 19, 2016

Arctic sea ice 2nd-lowest on record

Summertime sea ice in the Arctic reached a minimum on September 10 (unless it goes lower still). It's now tied for the second-lowest minimum in the satellite era.

Deborah Byrd

September 19, 2016

Milky Way with moon

The Milky Way is best seen with the eye alone in a moon-free sky, but this photographer caught the Milky Way in moonlight.

Deborah Byrd

September 19, 2016

Hubble sees a comet breaking up

This comet is spinning so fast it's ejecting building-sized chunks, littering space with a debris trail as wide as the continental U.S.

Deborah Byrd

September 18, 2016

Crack advances across Antarctic ice shelf

Satellite images of the crack in Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf. If it breaks off, it'll make an ice island in the Southern Ocean as large as one of the smallest U.S. states.

Deborah Byrd

September 17, 2016

Pluto ‘paints’ its largest moon red

"Who would have thought that Pluto is a graffiti artist, spray-painting its companion with a reddish stain that covers an area the size of New Mexico?"

Deborah Byrd

September 15, 2016

Deborah Byrd

Deborah Byrd (asteroid 3505 Byrd) helps edit EarthSky.org and is a frequent host of EarthSky videos. Deborah created the EarthSky radio series in 1991 and founded EarthSky.org in 1994. Prior to that, she had worked for the University of Texas McDonald Observatory since 1976, and created and produced their Star Date radio series. She has won a galaxy of awards from the broadcasting and science communities, including having an asteroid named in her honor in 1990, a Public Service Award from the National Science Board in 2003, and the Education Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 2020. A science communicator and educator since 1976, Byrd believes in science as a force for good in the world and a vital tool for the 21st century. "Being an EarthSky editor is like hosting a big global party for cool nature-lovers," she says.