Word: starlight
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Every performance has a show-stopping moment, and Trapper’s was when he sang his newest song, “Starlight.” An autobiographical story of homesickness and missing the girl he left behind, “Starlight” had many girls (and some guys—though they’ll never admit it) in tears. “Starlight” is the kind of song every girl wants written about...
...pity is, it can be done right. Years after the Florida trip, I ventured back onto a sleeper train for a totally different experience: My boyfriend and I booked ourselves onto the Coast Starlight, for a two-day jaunt from San Francisco to Seattle...
...nearly a half-century, starting in 1949, the world's most powerful research-quality telescope was the Hale, on Palomar Mountain, in California. Its mirror, 5 m (17 ft.) in diameter, focused more faint starlight than anything else on the planet. But in the past few years, the Hale has been humbled. Here on Mauna Kea alone sit the Subaru telescope (no relation to the car), with a mirror more than 8 m (27 ft.) across; the Gemini North telescope, also topping 8 m; and the kings of the mountain, the twin Keck telescopes, whose light-gathering surfaces...
Still, U.S.-based telescopes remain ahead on several fronts, including the detwinkling of starlight. The technology that does this is called adaptive optics, and it was originally developed in secrecy by the Department of Defense to help military snoops take sharp pictures of Soviet spy satellites. Largely declassified in the 1980s, it's now being adapted for major telescopes everywhere. The idea is straightforward: stars and galaxies twinkle and shimmer because turbulent pockets of air act as weak, light-distorting lenses (heat rising from a car's hood or an asphalt parking lot causes a similar effect). With adaptive optics...
...There's a romance to living out in the Kalahari desert," DeVore says. "You could almost read a newspaper by starlight...