In 1963, the USSR sent Valentina Tereshkova – the first female cosmonaut – into orbit around the Earth. It was another 20 years before the United States overcame the systemic sexism that was keeping them from sending women into space.

In elementary school, I learned that Christopher Columbus was the only man in his time to believe that the Earth was round. This is why he wanted to sail westwards to India, to prove everyone wrong. People would tell him “You’re crazy! You’re going to reach the edge of the flat Earth!”, and he would answer “Of course not, the Earth is round!”. So in a way, he is painted to be this visionary genius who made it possible for Europeans to arrive on a new…

As I was writing a booklet for an astronomy class I was teaching, I looked for illustrations to explain various elements of celestial mechanics. But I wanted the style of all the illustrations to be coherent. So just fetching images from Wikipedia wasn’t enough.

There is a kind of small, compact galaxy in which many stars are forming. They are one tenth of the size of our own Milky Way Galaxy, and one hundred times more compact. They are called green pea galaxies.

In 1957, Sputnik was launched, marking the begining of the era of space exploration. It was the first time humans put an object in orbit around the Earth. Since that date, we have sent many satellites, probes, capsules, and space stations into space. And we also sent a few objects that are more… unexpected.

Astronauts are hand-picked among tens of thousands of other candidates to travel into space. So you might think that once they went through all of this, they don’t have anything left to prove to anyone… And yet…

Since the early 20th century, the International Astronomical Union or IAU – an organization that brings together astronomers from around the world – defines the names used by astronomers to talk about objects in the Solar System. In August 2006, the IAU decided a planet is an object that

The pavement requires frequent renewal of the top surface. The frequency depends on the type of pavement and on the weather. Asphalt for instance suffers a lot of damage when it snows and becomes less viscous when it is very hot, causing heavy aircraft to sink.

J’avais initialement songé à faire des vidéos de moi qui joue du ukulélé, mais mon PC vieillissant rendait la tâche trop galère. Donc vous n’aurez que le son !