Fall Back

Enjoy an earlier sunrise starting Sunday morning, when our area reverts to Eastern Standard Time.
The earlier sunsets affords opportunities to view the glories of the night sky. Saturn and Mars are easy targets; Saturn in the southwest and Mars in the south at 5:30pm.
In this time when accusations of ‘fake news’ are often invoked, let’s pay tribute to a long-ago radio broadcast that laid the groundwork. It was 80 years ago this week that Orson Welles broadcast his famous radio performance of ‘War of the Worlds,’ a fictional show depicting a Martian invasion at Grover’s Mill near Princeton, NJ.
Thousands of listeners were terrified, even though plenty of disclaimers were included in the broadcast.

The Kepler Planet Hunter is kaput! After nine-and-a-half years and 2,800 confirmed planetary discoveries in our Milky Way, Kepler finally ran out of fuel. It’s been placed in a safe, stable solar orbit. Its biggest contribution: the suggestion that every star has at least one planet. NASA’s Opportunity Rover on Mars might also be kaput, as it hasn’t radioed in since the summer’s dust storm on Mars.