Author: Derrick Lester

In areas that don’t typically receive much astronomical attention, a quiet kind of buzz is growing. Months ago, hotels in A Coruña began to fill up. I was casually informed by a friend who works for a small tour operator in northern Spain that they sold out of their August inventory before the previous summer was even over. On August 12, 2026, people want to be standing somewhere, anywhere, beneath the path of totality. Because of the peculiar geometry, astronomers describe the eclipse itself with a small smile. About 2.2 days after perigee, the Moon will pass between the Earth…

The Rockies’ refusal to adhere to a calendar has an almost theatrical quality. The first official backyard get-together of the year, charcoal smoke, and sunburned shoulders are all expected during Memorial Day weekend. Rather, a large portion of the West is witnessing yet another round of winter, and the forecast does not appear to be making an apology. The timing is what causes people to hesitate, even though the system itself is not very unusual in shape. While a second trough further south is unwilling to let go, an upper trough that is sliding down from western Canada is dipping…

As she usually does on weekdays, Marianne Nelson left her Rawlins home at 5:15 a.m. It typically takes her ten minutes to get to the Wyoming State Penitentiary. By eleven, she was still in her car, with a quarter tank of gas remaining, three semitrucks obstructing her view, and snow falling so heavily that she was unable to see past the windshield. That’s the problem with a May blizzard in Wyoming. Unlike a January storm, it doesn’t make an announcement. People anticipate that winter will be over by now, which contributes to the danger of a storm like this. By…

When the subject of North Sea oil comes up in Westminster these days, there’s an odd silence. It’s not quite silence, but rather a tense quiet, as though everyone in the room is aware that the dispute is far from resolved. With the same conviction he has held for years, Ed Miliband presented the case once more in front of Labour MPs this week. He maintains that the UK can only attain energy sovereignty by eschewing fossil fuels. On paper, the position seems straightforward. It’s not at all like that in reality. At a difficult time, the decision was made…

Early in May, there’s a certain quiet on the Richardson Highway that makes you think the season has finally changed. Glennallen has a gravel-like scent. The lowlands are loosening, but the Wrangells continue to wear their snow. Every few years, a Bering Sea low determines that spring can wait. It appears that this weekend is one of those occasions. On Thursday, May 7, the National Weather Service Anchorage office issued a Winter Storm Watch in addition to advisories and high wind warnings that were already in effect from Bristol Bay into the eastern Aleutians. The Eastern Alaska Range backcountry may…

Driving along the E11 highway and observing the endless stretch of sun-bleached, level coastline is almost surreal. Suddenly, four massive concrete domes emerge from the haze of the desert. Unlike oil refineries with their tangled steel and blazing flares, the Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant doesn’t make an announcement. It produces about 25% of the electricity used daily in the United Arab Emirates while remaining silent and almost monastic. That’s an odd and subtly radical thing for a nation whose modern identity was based on hydrocarbons. The story of the plant started in December 2009 when a coalition led by Korea…

The thought of an astronaut strapped inside a capsule a quarter of a million miles from home, leaning toward the window and catching a flicker of light on the grey skin of the moon, is subtly exciting. Not a camera. No instrument. Just someone observing. That is basically what happened in early April when the four crew members of Artemis 2 slipped behind the far side of the moon and started reporting what they saw: brief, unrepeatable flashes, each of which was a tiny meteoroid vaporizing against the regolith to end its arduous journey. As the first crewed lunar orbit…

The giant squid was mostly found in sailors’ fantasies and on the edges of ancient maps for the majority of recorded history. Never on a research vessel, but the kind of creature you heard about in a tavern in port town. Even now, when you walk through a museum’s natural history section and stand in front of a preserved specimen behind glass, there’s an odd disconnect: the animal itself is still associated with folklore, even though the body and suckers are real. When researchers lowered bait from a vessel off the Ogasawara Islands in Japan in 2006 and waited, that…

A bright orange sailing drone is currently pushing through a swell that most commercial ships would gladly navigate around somewhere in the North Atlantic. There is no one on board. No crew is inspecting the rigging, and no captain is yelling commands. Saildrone, a California-based company, created a slim, wind-powered vessel that glides through a storm because that’s precisely where the interesting data resides. This type of mission was primarily a slideshow in a research proposal five years ago. These days, it serves as the foundation for a new method of observing how the ocean truly affects our climate. The…

A researcher is most likely sitting somewhere in a NOAA office, gazing at a screen that shows a map of the Pacific with warm hues slowly moving eastward. These days, climate scientists essentially do that. They observe. And what they’ve been witnessing lately is an area of the ocean that, according to most accounts, is acting in ways that are both recognizable and a little unsettling. On the surface, the current in question doesn’t seem particularly dramatic. From a fishing boat off the Galápagos or a beach in Lima, you wouldn’t notice it. However, beneath the waves, a sizable pool…