... An article about Tycho and several pictures of him . ... Probably pretty bad: daily showers were still a few centuries off.. ... A tidbit: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the Danish courtiers in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" (and in Tom Stoppard's play " Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead") probably got their names from two relatives of Tycho who visited England in 1592 on a diplomatic mission, Frederick Rosenkrantz, 3rd cousin of Tycho, and Knut Gyldenstierne, also a cousin. ...
The Sun is our nearest star and the source of energy for life on Earth. ... For centuries astronomers wondered whether they were clouds floating in the Sun's atmosphere, but we now know that they really are huge regions of magnetic field, about as intense as the field at the poles of an iron magnet. ... Such abrupt events were named solar flares , and what made them especially interesting was that occasionally, after a prominent flare, a magnetic storm would erupt on Earth. ...
... The craters were caused by the impacts of comets and asteroids. ... In fact, up to a diameter of about 10 meters (33 feet), most stony meteoroids are destroyed in the atmosphere in a terminal explosion. ... The famous meteor crater in northern Arizona, some 1.2 kilometers (4,000 feet) in diameter and 183 meters (600 feet) deep, was created 50,000 years ago by a nickel-iron meteorite perhaps 60 meters (197 feet) in diameter. ... These range in diameter from a few meters to about 8 km. ...