I want to thank all of you so much for reading; I’ve been fortunate to have so many of you who love this column reach out to me or my editors to tell us so. It can be difficult throwing your writing out into the print world these days, when much of the world relies on instant feedback from the internet, so I was always happy to hear when an article particularly struck a fancy, or instigated a question that I could try to help answer.

My parents did a lot to help instill my interest in astronomy. My mom would comb the newspaper for upcoming events, and have us go outside to see the moon turn dark and red during a lunar eclipse, or wake my brother and dad and I up at 2 a.m. to drive out to a road with no streetlights so we could watch a meteor shower from the comfort of our sleeping bags.

My point is that it’s easy to kindle an interest and to have it grow from there, and one of my hopes for this column was that it could be a similar spark that would create conversations, interest, and additional exploration.

Thanks to your emails, I know it has. Whether it’s the mother who reads this column every week with her teenage son, or the ex-wife, who reminisced about following the Apollo missions with her ex-husband and sent him the columns as a reminder of good times past, or the man who thought he’d really enjoy one of the books I’d reviewed and had me help place it on hold for him at his local library, or the famous astronomer who I profiled in my column without realizing he and his wife enjoyed reading it every week.

I think I can safely assume there are many more of you out there who have also relished thinking and talking about the concepts I broached each week, and I hope that I’m not disappointing all of you too much now that it’s coming to an end.

If this column has sparked an interest and you want to keep it lit, I have a couple of recommendations. I relied heavily on earthsky.org to help me with my weekly description of the placement of the planets; you can read their guide to the planets every month and get a good idea of what bright object you might be looking at, or go to their “tonight” menu to see something interesting to look at each night.

If you’re a social media savant, I’d recommend following any of NASA’s myriad accounts. You can follow the Mars rovers, the Hubble Space Telescope, the International Space Station, and more. Aside from great photos and telling you the latest they’re all up to, you can also learn things like how to send your name to Mars in 2020 with the next rover (go.nasa.gov/Mars2020pass). I’ve encouraged a blanket exploration of NASA’s website in the past; that’s still a hearty recommendation.

As always, the best way to get excited about astronomy is to go out and see it for yourself. Check out your local observatory and see what programs they have running. Keep an eye out in your newspaper for major upcoming events — we often will let you know the best place to view in the area, and where amateur and professional astronomers might be gathering with their telescopes for even better viewing.

Every now and then, on a moonless night, get out away from city lights. Find a dark, quiet nook where you can soak in the majesty of the night sky, and think about how much we’ve learned simply by observing it.

And always remember to keep looking up.

LOOKING UP THIS WEEK: Saturn and Jupiter will be up most of the night and into the dawn, moving across the sky. Mars still graces the evening sky in the west, with a dim Mercury very close by. The moon is currently a waxing crescent and will be first quarter on Wednesday.

Marisa Stoller can be reached at mstoller.mba@gmail.com or on Twitter @MarisaStoller.

Most people know you can see the occasional meteor streaking across the sky on any given night. Many might call it a shooting star, though any amateur astronomer worth their salt will wince at the misnomer.

A meteor is actually a tiny bit of grit or sand burning through Earth’s atmosphere, and has nothing to do with the stars. The light comes not from the disintegration of the meteor itself, but from how it super-heats the air molecules as it passes by. The bigger and faster that particle is traveling (they typically range from 20-45 miles per hour), the brighter the streak.

If you’re really lucky, you may see a fireball, which is a larger piece that lights up the whole area around you, or a bolide, which breaks apart into fragments as it travels. Don’t worry about these rocks falling on your head, though — meteors very rarely make it all the way through Earth’s atmosphere. Remember, most of the meteors you’re seeing are no larger than a grain of sand, and the brightest are probably only the size of a pea.

A meteor shower occurs on a yearly basis when the Earth passes through the same area of space it did in the past year, and comes into contact with a bunch of tiny particles that hang out in that area of space, often left behind by a comet or asteroid.

The Delta Aquarids meteor shower will be at its peak Sunday night and Monday morning, producing about 20 meteors per hour with a waning crescent moon that shouldn’t give you too much viewing trouble. These bits of dust were left behind by two comets, Kracht and Marsden. You’ll want to focus your viewing on the constellation of Aquarius to see the most meteors (hence the name of the shower), but they can come from anywhere in the sky.

If you’ve got other plans this weekend, never fear; the Perseids meteor shower is only a few weeks away, peaking on the evening of August 12 and morning of August 13, and known for its bright and numerous meteors. However, the moon will be nearly full this year, which will block out many of the dimmer meteors. But with an average of 60 a night, you will likely still get a decent show. This shower is caused by the Swift-Tuttle comet, and again as you can tell by the naming, you should be looking toward the constellation of Pegasus for the most meteors.

The best way to see the show is to get away from city lights and roads where headlights may cross your path and ruin your night vision. This is key if you’re serious about viewing the showers and are willing to drive a bit for a first-rate perspective. Websites like Dark Sky Finder can help to reveal and rate the light pollution in your area to give you an idea of the better spots to watch from. Best viewing is after midnight. Enjoy!

LOOKING UP THIS WEEK: Saturn and Jupiter will be up most of the night and into the dawn, moving across the sky. Mars still graces the evening sky in the west, with a dim Mercury very close by. The moon is currently a waning crescent and will be new on Wednesday.

Marisa Stoller can be reached at mcorley@norcaldesigncenter.com or on Twitter @MarisaStoller.

First, I want to warn you, this book isn’t about all the science and technology it took to get us to the moon. Even the author admits that this book is more of a presidential history than a serious look at the space program. But it gets into the political and world details that allowed the moonshot to push forward, and is a fascinating glimpse of the world at the time, with all the stars that aligned to make it happen.

We start out with World War II and Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocket scientist, who intentionally surrendered to American troops rather than Soviets. Brinkley takes pains to point out that while many accepted his help at the time, considering it better than allowing the Soviets to take all von Braun’s rocket knowledge for their own use, it in no way absolved him of his past in the Nazi regime. But there’s also no denying that his expertise was one of the main forces that made the lunar landing possible, especially after the death of Robert H. Goddard (America’s own rocket scientist).

From there, the novel focuses on JFK’s early years in the military and then later on in politics, from a young, pretty face in a newly-televised Congress to the strongly spoken president he became, and the struggles he faced along the way. The Cold War tensions play an obvious role, with Congress willing to put forward the money (at least at the start) to fund the fledgling civilian agency NASA in the space race against the Soviets for fear of falling behind and possible nuclear annihilation.

The distance of time from the subject matter does a great deal for this book, in that so many of the players, even on the Russian side, have now written their own memoirs that can be drawn on to paint a clear picture of what was actually happening at the time. Information that was classified back then is also now much more accessible. Brinkley does a good job of reminding the reader of what was currently known or understood at the time, while weaving in the reality of the situation. The book is meticulously researched, and uses many personal quotes from key participants to really bring you back to the thought process JFK and his advisers were going through when he decided to declare the U.S. intention of going to the moon before the decade was out.

It also amazed me how similar Kennedy’s considerations for sending a human to the moon verses sending a robot are to today’s question of Mars exploration. Money was also a consideration then; poverty programs could have gotten a huge boost instead of putting money toward a project that might have been a huge waste had it exploded on the launch pad.

Overall, I enjoyed reading about something that united the U.S., at least for a time, and ignited the imagination of the world as humankind made its giant leap into the future of space exploration.

LOOKING UP THIS WEEK: Saturn and Jupiter will be up most of the night and into the dawn, moving across the sky. Mars still graces the evening sky in the west, with a dim Mercury very close by. The moon is currently a waning gibbous and will be third quarter on Wednesday.

Marisa Stoller can be reached at mcorley@norcaldesigncenter.com or on Twitter @MarisaStoller.

We trekked back to the lake and set up camp, eating a delectable meal of sausage and mac and cheese after a long day of climbing with heavy packs. We watched the sun disappear behind a high mountain as the sky turned pink. I pointed out Jupiter, and we looked at another reddish star nearby. My brother declared that it wasn’t a planet because it twinkled, and only stars twinkled.

I frowned at that. I knew that twinkling was caused by light traveling through the Earth’s atmosphere, causing it to bounce around a bit and make it appear to flicker, growing brighter and dimmer. But the light from a planet would also be traveling through the same atmosphere, so wouldn’t that also cause it to twinkle?

As I mentioned this conundrum to my dad and brother, I looked up at Jupiter, which was the first thing I had spotted as the sky darkened down. It didn’t appear to be twinkling.

My brother laid down his trump card, saying he knew it was so because our old astronomy professor had said it. We both had gone through several courses and observational labs in college with Keith Waxman, the man, the myth, the legend, and I was immediately inclined to believe him with Waxman as the source, despite my hesitation.

But I promised to investigate more thoroughly when we were back in service range — our cell phones were blessedly only useful as clocks and cameras, giving us some uninterrupted time to just sit, talk and soak in the views without any distraction. And I agreed to give my brother public acknowledgement of astronomic expertise should it be merited.

So I would now like to publicly admit that my brother was entirely correct: Stars twinkle, and planets do not. The reason for this is the distance. Stars are so far away, they appear only as tiny pinpricks of light, making it much easier for turbulence in our atmosphere to distort that single beam. There’s actually an official name for this: astronomical scintillation.

Planets, on the other hand, are a lot closer and appear bigger, giving off more light. Parts of that light might still refract a bit, but it’s kind of cancelled out as one zigs one way and one zags another. They can also appear to twinkle a tiny bit when viewed just above the horizon, when we’re seeing them through more of Earth’s atmosphere than usual.

Regardless of if you’re looking at planets or stars up there, (and regardless of if you can tell the difference between them) I highly, highly recommend taking occasional trips such as these to get far away from city lights and really let the darkness envelop you. You can see so much more without all that light pollution, and it’s a good reminder to appreciate this beautiful sphere we live on, and all the universe still waiting for us out there.

LOOKING UP THIS WEEK: In the predawn mornings, you’ll find a bright Venus low in the east, but difficult to see in the sun’s glare. Saturn and Jupiter will be up most of the night and into the dawn, moving across the sky. Mars still graces the evening sky in the west, with a dim Mercury very close by. The moon is currently a waxing gibbous and will be full on Tuesday; much of central Europe and Africa will be seeing a lunar eclipse then, but we’ll only be hearing about it from California.

Marisa Stoller can be reached at mcorley@norcaldesigncenter.com or on Twitter @MarisaStoller.

Disappointingly, the majority of Americans don’t seem that enthralled with the plan of sending astronauts to the moon or to Mars when we have robots to do the exploring. While we have certainly anthropomorphized our little Mars rovers, it’s definitely not the same as being able to land humans on the red planet.

“Been there, done that,” is a common refrain when we talk about returning to the moon, and it seems accurate enough, especially given that we’re only now cracking the seal to study some of the moon rocks brought back to Earth nearly 50 years ago.

Are having humans (and in particular, women, as Vice President Mike Pence calls for) bouncing around on the moon collecting samples really necessary for additional exploration, or are they more of a symbol, a reminder of our ability to do hard things? Things no other nation has yet replicated, mind you, despite the intervening 50 years.

Landing humans on the moon and sending them to Mars can definitely spur the imagination. But is it all just a great marketing campaign, or are there true merits to sending people instead of robots? Popular support may not be entirely necessary to glean the funds necessary for these expeditions, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

I’m somewhat undecided on the true necessity of it all. Being a writer, I do place value on the creative mind, and the ability for a person to notice something interesting that a robot (even one controlled by a human on the ground) would sweep right by. There are also experiments and observations that can be run by humans with the proper equipment in these locations that could be difficult to accomplish via robot from a planet away.

But the expense and risk of human life may currently outweigh that, especially in the minds of the popular majority. At least until other countries decide to establish a moon or Mars base and kick us into high gear.

The American space program has been the default powerhouse for so long that it’s strange to think that may soon no longer be the case. We’ve been looking to Russia to send our astronauts to the International Space Station, and will soon turn to private corporations for the technology to get them there. China’s space program is up and coming, and they’re not the only horse in the race attempting to land more bots and eventually people on the moon.

Would we as Americans be OK with it if China beat us to Mars? Because honestly, it’s not really a question of if mankind goes to Mars, but when. It may not be for years, but assuming humankind doesn’t blow itself to oblivion, expansion to other nearby planets just seems like the next logical step.

My national pride says no — the first Martian should be American, or failing that, at least part of an international effort. Because don’t forget all those economic benefits we get from striving for things that are hard, and the technology booms for our nation, in addition to the pure patriotism it brings. We could use a little unity, now more than ever. Happy Fourth.

LOOKING UP THIS WEEK: In the predawn mornings, you’ll find a bright Venus low in the east, but difficult to see in the sun’s glare. Saturn and Jupiter will be up most of the night and into the dawn, moving across the sky. Mars still graces the evening sky in the west, with a dim Mercury very close by. The moon is currently a waxing crescent and will be first quarter on Tuesday.

Marisa Stoller can be reached at mcorley@norcaldesigncenter.com or on Twitter @MarisaStoller.

On the reassuring side, 60 percent of Americans believe that the work of the U.S. space program has justified its cost, with 38 percent dissenting. Considering that costs, adjusted for inflation, hover over $900 billion since NASA’s establishment in 1958, we’ve definitely put in a large chunk of change, so it’s reassuring that the majority of Americans do think it’s been worth it. This is contrasted with 1979, 10 years after we landed the first human on the moon, when only 41 percent thought the expenses were warranted.

I’m definitely on the side that thinks our space program is worthwhile. I’m naturally fascinated by all the news coming out of the probes orbiting other planets as we learn what’s possible in other gravities, and of our studies of living in space coming from the International Space Station, but there’s a lot more that has come out of NASA than just scientific research.

Just look at all the technologies and advancements that have come out of the research and development of our space program. Satellite technology assists with weather forecasting, internet broadcasting, and monitoring of natural disasters to name only a few. Health advances have come from studying the bone density of astronauts on the ISS, and from NASA robotics, which have assisted in the creation of better artificial muscle systems and more functional artificial limbs.

Safety has been improved on highways by cutting grooves in concrete for better traction, for aircraft with their anti-icing systems and for general fire-resistance, in buildings, clothing and firefighting gear. Solar energy and water purification systems are also products developed for or with the assistance of NASA, as is the Dustbuster vacuum cleaner. The list goes on.

According to the poll, the majority of Americans believe that the top objective for the U.S. space program should be the monitoring of asteroids and comets coming into our solar system. I feel like this makes a lot of sense as a place for agreement among the masses — no one wants to go the way of the dinosaurs. It does seem a little short-sighted to some extent, but hey, there’s no need to think about the long term if we’re all going to die in a cloud of volcanic ash, right?

The second main objective the majority found important was continuing scientific research into our planet, our solar system and the universe. I’m seeing this as funding for labs all over the country to continue to do their work, using telescopes both on the ground and in space. I think that scientific and astronomical research is one of the best things we can do for future generations, so it’s reassuring that 6 in 10 find this very or extremely important as well.

While I talk a lot about the majority for this poll, the minority are not few in number. I’d love to hear more personal takes from readers on these considerations, both this week and next, when we talk about what Americans thought about sending astronauts to the moon and to Mars.

LOOKING UP THIS WEEK: In the predawn mornings, you’ll find a bright Venus low in the east. Saturn and Jupiter will be up most of the night and into the dawn, moving across the sky. Mars still graces the evening sky in the west, with a dim Mercury very close by. The moon is currently a waning crescent and will be new on Tuesday.

Marisa Stoller can be reached at mcorley@norcaldesigncenter.com or on Twitter @MarisaStoller.

One of his more macabre stories ended with, “but they were crazy to go out diving that night, you know? It was a full moon.”

Let me reassure you, this wasn’t a reference to werewolf fish, by any means. Instead, he was alluding to the moon’s effect on the ocean tides and how currents in that area are so much stronger with the pull of the moon.

In fact, the gravity of both the sun and the moon are what create the tides in our oceans. But the moon’s proximity to those oceans, despite its weaker gravity, allows it to exert the most influence over our waters. So we see high tides both on the side of the Earth where the moon is, and on the opposite side, and low tides in between as the water is pulled toward those two ends.

Most parts of the world see two tides a day (those that don’t usually have geological features preventing it). You might think this would mean that high tide and low tide would be around the same time each day through out the year. But if you’ve been to the ocean, you’d realize this isn’t the case, as the tide slowly changes if you look out at it at the same hour every day.

This is because tides aren’t on a 24-hour day cycle, like our planet, but are on a lunar day cycle, which is about 50 minutes longer. While a solar day (24 hours) returns Earth to its exact same position relative to the sun, it has to spin around a little longer to reach its exact same position relative to the moon. Because remember, the moon is moving around us, too!

But back to the tide differences regarding the full moon. When the moon is full, it means it is on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun, because the sun’s full light is shining on it. When we have a new moon, it means the sun and the moon are on the same side, since we can’t see any part of the daytime side of the moon.

At these extremes, when the sun, moon and Earth are all in direct alignment, the gravitational pull of the moon and sun combine to give us the highest high tides of the month. These are typically called king or spring tides (nothing to do with the season, more to do with jumping, as the water level jumps up higher).

We also get far lower tides than normal around the first and third quarter moons, when the opposite effect is occurring. The sun and the moon are at odds and counteract one another, creating neap tides (meaning “without the power”).

The moral of the full moon story? Always take a guide with you when diving in unfamiliar waters. Those who live by the sea get to know its ways and features, and outside forces you may not know about can be at play.

LOOKING UP THIS WEEK: In the predawn mornings, you’ll find a bright Venus low in the east. Saturn and Jupiter will be up most of the night and into the dawn, moving across the sky. Mars still graces the evening sky in the west, with a dim Mercury very close by. Friday marks the summer solstice for those of us in the northern hemisphere, the longest day of the year. The moon is currently a waning gibbous and will be third quarter on Tuesday.

Marisa Stoller can be reached at mcorley@norcaldesigncenter.com or on Twitter @MarisaStoller.

Frank Drake was born in Chicago in 1930, and from a young age he was a frequent visitor to the city’s Museum of Science & Industry. In particular, the museum boasted an astronomic exhibit discussing how our star is a fairly average star compared to all those billions that make up the galaxy. This exhibit made young Frank wonder about other life that might be out there circling around those distant stars.

Drake earned a degree in engineering physics from Cornell, which he attended on a Navy scholarship, then served for several years on the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Albany before joining Harvard’s astronomy graduate program. Since he was handy at fixing electronics, Drake was assigned to the radio astronomy team, which often had equipment malfunctions. Drake ended up heartily enjoying the work, recognizing that contact with or detection of extraterrestrial life would likely come by way of radio astronomy.

After graduation, he started at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in West Virginia, and only a year later, organized the staff in a secret program called “Project Ozma” to search for alien signals. Drake didn’t want the program to be public for fear of mockery, but a paper published just before the project began — suggesting astronomers should be on the lookout for alien transmissions — convinced him to disclose the project.

On Project Ozma’s first day, the team had a bit of excitement, believing they had uncovered an alien signal, but later analysis had Drake concluding that it was merely a nearby airbase conducting a signal test. However, the press had already heard the swirling rumors, and conspiracy theorists still point to this occurrence as a possible cover-up. Officially, no alien signals were found by the team, and this was the start of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Drake was a founding trustee of the SETI Institute, and continues to serve on the board today.

Drake made a number of contributions to his field aside from his famous equation estimating the possibilities of contactable alien civilizations. He was the first to map the center of the Milky Way, something that could only be done with a radio telescope because of the interstellar dust blocking it from our view.

He also did other work in the interest of first contact with alien races. With Carl Sagan, Drake helped to design the Pioneer Plaque message, which was attached to Pioneer 10 and 11, two spacecraft that had been built to leave our solar system for the stars beyond. We’ve since lost contact with both. Drake later also helped to create the Voyager Golden Record, a similar attempt at communication should extraterrestrials pick up the Voyager spacecrafts, which are still heading out into space. This time, music, voices, heartbeats, and other sounds were included rather than only basic pictures and descriptions of our solar system.

Finally, Drake sent a radio message dubbed the Arecibo message to M13, a star cluster about 25,000 light years from Earth, with descriptions of DNA and our solar system. Considering that radio travels at about the speed of light, it may take some time to hear back (50,000 years for a round trip) if there are any aliens out there receiving our signal.

LOOKING UP THIS WEEK: In the predawn mornings, you’ll find a bright Venus low in the east. Saturn and Jupiter will be up most of the night and into the dawn, moving across the sky. Mars still graces the evening sky in the west, with a dim Mercury very close by. The moon is currently a waxing gibbous and will be full on Monday.

Marisa Stoller can be reached at mcorley@norcaldesigncenter.com or on Twitter @MarisaStoller.

It’s a question that sparks the imagination, one that I think all who find astronomy fascinating have asked themselves at least a time or two.

Unsurprisingly, it’s perked the interest of a number of scientists and astronomers as well. In fact, in 1961, one radio astronomer came up with a way to calculate out the possibilities. It was actually a bit of an accident — Frank Drake was helping to organize a conference on the search for extraterrestrial life, and realized that all the key subjects he had written up as conference topics could be expressed as a number. And each of those numbers, multiplied together, could beget an estimate for the number of alien civilizations whose existence we might be able to detect. This equation came to be known as the Drake Equation.

There are seven variables that make up the Drake Equation, all multiplied together. A key point to take away from this is that we don’t conclusively know what all the variables in the equation ought to be, but we can look at the results of using optimistic numbers versus using pessimistic numbers.

First, there are three variables that make up the calculation that tells us the number of possible habitable planets where life might form. They are the rate at which new stars form, the fraction of those stars that have planets around them, and the number of planets in a solar system that would be suitable for life.

Looking at both optimistic and pessimistic numbers, scientists usually go with seven as the magic number of new stars in our Milky Way Galaxy each year. Of those stars, what percentage might have planets? From our observations, 40 percent of stars similar to our sun seem to have planets, and we’re finding more every day with new methods. So an optimistic estimate might be 100 percent, and a pessimistic would be 20 percent. That leaves us with the average number of habitable planets per solar system. In our solar system, that’s currently one — planet Earth. Scientists usually go with 0.2 optimistically, and 0.02 pessimistically, seeing that we see a lot of strange orbits of exoplanets (planets outside our solar system).

Then, we multiply the percent of those habitable planets that actually develop life, and the fraction of that life which becomes intelligent. Scientists put life development at 10 percent optimistically and 0.1 percent pessimistically, and intelligence at 1 percent and 0.1 percent, respectively.

And finally, our chance of actually detecting these intelligent civilizations. What percentage of that intelligent life is capable of interstellar communication, and how long would they broadcast? We’ll go with 1 out of 100 intelligent civilizations will discover radio both optimistically and pessimistically. How long would those civilizations broadcast into space? Some say it could be as long as 10 million years, while conservative estimates are more like 500 years. We’ve been going for about 100 years ourselves so far, but there’s always the chance we might wipe ourselves from existence with a nuclear war any day now.

And now, let’s take a look at our results. Optimistically, that puts us at 1,400 other civilizations in our galaxy alone, and 210,000 billion in the universe. But the pessimistic numbers say there are 0.0000014 communicating civilizations in our galaxy, which could mean that we’re the only ones here in the Milky Way. But in the rest of the universe, we’re in good company. 210,000 civilizations could be broadcasting their radios for us to detect one day out there.

In reality, the number is probably somewhere in between these two extremes. And there are a number of factors not necessarily taken into account — remember, this equation is only for civilizations we might be able to detect via radio frequencies. Maybe there are other ways of communicating we haven’t come across yet, or types of life that evolved quite differently from us.

There are a number of Drake Equation calculators online if you’d like to try plugging in your own values. For this particular math problem, there’s no real wrong answer. At least not yet.

LOOKING UP THIS WEEK: In the predawn mornings, you’ll find a bright Venus low in the east. Saturn and Jupiter will be up most of the night and into the dawn, moving across the sky. Mars still graces the evening sky in the west, with a dim Mercury near the moon. The moon is currently a waxing crescent and will be first quarter on Sunday.

Marisa Stoller can be reached at mcorley@norcaldesigncenter.com or on Twitter @MarisaStoller.

This announcement was meant to introduce some near-future plans, in particular, a lunar lander called Blue Moon. Considering NASA’s attempts to involve contractors in President Donald Trump’s administration’s goal of returning astronauts to the moon, Bezos’ company may be the best positioned to take on that challenge, with Elon Musk’s SpaceX a serious competitor. Bezos also announced that Blue Origins’ flights to suborbital space will start this year, taking passengers up high enough to experience a few minutes of weightlessness before returning to the ground.

While all of that sounds amazing (anyone have an extra $250,000 they want to give me for a round trip ticket to space?) it was really Bezos’ vision of the far future that got my attention. In contrast to Musk’s conception of a Mars colony, he spoke seriously about humanity taking to space and staying there, living in giant space stations.

Or course, this got me thinking about all the great science fiction there is about living in space, either on a station or long-term in space. There are a lot, and they are varied, but in nearly all of them, someone gets sucked out into space at some point. But maybe that’s just the space station version of a fatal car crash, the cost of doing business?

Bezos says his ideal space colonies would spin to create artificial gravity, and have large solar panels to take in warmth, light and energy, which would be beamed into the stations for an artificial day and night. In his vision, the stations would be like paradise, with their temperature controls and perfect weather. He’s obviously never been to my house. We may have the technology to create whatever temperature we want, but we still haven’t learned to agree on what the perfect temperature is, exactly.

I’ve also read far too many books (OK, there’s television and movies too) about life in space to expect it to be such a utopia. I mean, maybe it’s just that entertainment about a utopia would be boring, so the worst is always happening, but it seems so easy for a single micro asteroid to take down a whole section when you don’t have Earth’s gravity to keep your air where you want it.

I also didn’t hear anything how inhabitants would be protected from cosmic particles and radiation, but considering this is a place for several generations from now, maybe such shielding will be invented by then. After all, it is something they’re thinking about currently on the International Space Station.

Bezos also mentioned that these space stations might be a place of escape for people, where they can flee to get away from wars, persecution or overpopulation, the main reason he cites as the need for them in the first place. They’re meant to be self-sustaining pods that could grow their own food and recycle water, and somewhere you wouldn’t perhaps need to wait two years for your visa to come through.

I guess the real question is if there will be those adventurous enough to take on the challenges of living in space. Would you?

LOOKING UP THIS WEEK: In the predawn mornings, you’ll find a bright Venus low in the east. Saturn and Jupiter will be in the south each morning, with a brighter Jupiter slightly to the right. Mars still graces the evening sky in the west. The moon is currently a waning crescent and will be new on Monday.

Marisa Stoller can be reached at mcorley@norcaldesigncenter.com or on Twitter @MarisaStoller.