BAN subscription discount, Book stuff, A City on Mars, Great astronomy vids

Subscribers are always full price in my soul

Newsletter subscription sale!

I feel like celebrating.

For one thing, as you read this I’m in Nebraska giving a talk about my book, which was published last week. Last I checked it was doing pretty OK, and the reviews are making me happy (see below). Hurray!

So hey, I think I will celebrate! How? By having a sale and giving a discount on the price of this newsletter subscription!

Monday issues are free and will always remain so, but normally if you want to also get Tuesday and Thursday issues it’s $5/month or $50/year.

But, starting right now until Tuesday May 2, 2023, I’m taking 20% off both prices: You can sign up for $4 for one month or $40 for the next year!

If you’re a free or new subby all you have to do is go to this special discount page and then go through the usual signup steps. That’s it!

And either way, thanks for being a subscriber to this newsletter. There’s a lot of Universe to talk about, and it’s an honor to be able to share it with you.

My book

This is about Under Alien Skies, isn’t it? Yes. Yes it is.

I was interviewed for Wired magazine’s “Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy” podcast about — you guessed it — my book, under Alien Skies. They have a synopsis online, and you can listen to the episode here. Or you can listen on YouTube:

I’m getting a lot of positive feedback about the book — BookPage gave it a solid review, for example — which is amazing and gratifying. The amount of effort that goes into publishing a book is extraordinary, and then you just sorta throw it out there and wait to see what happens… so I’m pretty happy.

Order it here!

I recommend

Something I think you’ll like

For a change of pace, how about I plug someone else’s book?

My good friends Zach Weinersmith (the brain behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) and Kelly Weinersmith (who studies parasites and, likely, Zach) have written another book, and it’s great.

It’s called A City On Mars, and it just became available for pre-order (it comes out in November). It’s a look at the realities — the real realities — of space travel. A lot of rah-rah articles are written about going to the Moon and Mars, but none really digs into the idea of what we need to do to prepare ourselves to actually live in space.

This book does. They talk about things like sex in space, making babies in space (somewhat different than the previously listed topic), politics in space, law in space (a huge, huge deal), and more. And it’s done in an extremely accessible and fun/funny manner. These two can’t not be funny, even when the topic is very serious.

I helped them some for the first couple of chapters, and wrote a blurb for the book, too (you can find it listed about six light-years below some, um, somewhat bigger names). I think this is not only a great book but a very important one. Every space enthusiast needs to read it; a lot of them won’t like the conclusions — there’s a lot of work that needs to be done but is not being done to really live in space — but I’d like to see them argue against what’s written. This is one of the most (fine: THE most) thoroughly researched book I’ve ever read. They have the facts to back up what they say.

I really enjoyed reading it, and you will too. Pre-order it!

Astro Tidbit

A brief synopsis of some interesting astronomy/science news

I got a note from a group of astronomy students at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory who create short videos about astronomy topics. They call themselves Teach Astronomy/Active Galactic, and I watched a few of their videos; they’re really good!

They made a video about the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, aka

SOFIA, which is a big telescope mounted in the side of a 747 airplane. Yes, seriously; Earth’s lower atmosphere has a lot of water vapor in it that absorbs the kind of IR light the observatory looks at, so the plane flies high enough to get above most of it to get a clear view. It did a lot of interesting science, but was shut down in 2022.

Here’s their video:

As I watched the first part of the video I was wondering if this was going to be just a hagiography of SOFIA or would they talk about some of the issues about funding and science return, and whoa, they did! That pleased me greatly.

I love it when students want to do more science communication, and their videos are well done and informative. If you want to follow this group they’re on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and have a website, too.

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!