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Readers!

 

It is now July, time once again to celebrate the start of this webpage in 2010 with my annual July fund-raising campaign.

 

This year I celebrate the fifteenth anniversary since I began Behind the Black. During that time I have done more than 33,000 posts, mostly covering the global space industry and the related planetary and astronomical science that comes from it. Along the way I have also felt compelled as a free American citizen to regularly post my thoughts on the politics and culture of the time, partly because I think it is important for free Americans to do so, and partly because those politics and that culture have a direct impact on the future of our civilization and its on-going efforts to explore and eventually colonize the solar system.

 

You can’t understand one without understanding the other.

 

Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent independent analysis you don’t find elsewhere. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn’t influenced by donations by established companies or political movements. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.

 

You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:

 

1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.

 

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July 30, 2025 Quick space links

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

2 comments

  • Max

    “Need I say it?”

    Yes I laughed..
    And I laughed again when I read the article.

    “”Based on the microlensing event’s properties, Mroz and colleagues were able to estimate that the lensing body object could be either a Neptune-mass planet located in the Milky Way’s galactic disk, around 15,000 light-years away. Alternatively, the rogue world could be a larger but more distant Saturn-mass object in the Milky Way’s galactic bulge, roughly 23,000 light-years away.””

    “Both scenarios are consistent with the microlensing signal we observed,” Mroz said

    You all know how I feel about incoherent light being seen as coherent light without a correcting lens. (light distorted into individual wave lengths and spread out like a rainbow through a gravitational prism, without another correcting prism to bring the light back together into the original coherent form)

    Uranus recently passed in front of a star for 400 ly away, we learned about a lot about that planet but nothing about microlensing.
    https://scitechdaily.com/nasa-just-got-a-rare-look-inside-uranus-heres-what-they-found/

    Again, A star passed behind Neptune in 2022. (occultations)
    But no mention of microlensing of the star.
    https://www.planetary.org/articles/a-deep-dive-into-the-neptune-system-with-jwst

    If microlensing was going to happen, the best telescopes and instruments we have would have documented the occurrence having happened in our own system.

    There are three phenomenon that can cause the bending of light, a magnetstar’s strong magnetic field can, just like in super colliders. Black holes and Stars nearing black hole status can do it with time distortion…. which changes the amplitude and frequency of the light.(dimming and changing its color/red shift) And of course with “gravity” which distorts the “space” that the light travels in. (when the light exits the distortion field, it will no longer be coherent but broken down into its frequency waveform and scattered across the spectrum)

  • Ronaldus Magnus

    Re: Rogue Exoplanet.

    When large enough and good enough observational tools are developed, we will find that the space-time continuum has been warped by gravity waves, and the “Rogue Planet” is actually a future Earth.

    The Wandering Earth

    https://m.imdb.com/title/tt7605074/

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