AI language models are getting pretty good at writing – but not so much at creative storytelling.

Find some of our favorite resources for the April 8, 2024, solar eclipse, including apps, video explainers, children's activities, and books.

The post Eclipse Apps, Books, Videos: Resources for the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Native American tribes each had their own full Moon names — we introduce the most commonly used ones and the traditions behind them.

The post Native American Full Moon Names for 2024 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Helen Sawyer Hogg stood at the front of a small but growing force of woman astronomers in the first half of the 20th century. This is her story.

The post Helen Sawyer Hogg: Giving the Stars to Everyone appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

The Royal Observatory Greenwich has announced the winners of the 16th annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest.

The post See the Photos that Won the Royal Observatory Greenwich's Astronomy Photographer of the Year Awards appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Beverly Lynds, a pioneer for women in astronomy and astrophysics, advanced the study of dust-and-gas clouds in the Milky Way.

The post Beverly Turner Lynds, 1929–2024 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Let’s go on a night-sky tour of the stars and planets that you’ll see overhead during August. Find a good seat for some great “shooting stars,” watch Saturn climb in the eastern sky in early evening, check out the summer's brightest stars, and start looking for a once-in-your-lifetime star blast. 

The post August Podcast: Nova Watch in the Northern Crown appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Use this month’s Sky Tour podcast to check out a very special Harvest Moon, track down all five bright planets, explore some lesser-known constellations, and bounce around the Summer Triangle. It’s a great introduction to the late-summer sky, all in a friendly, informative narration that’s suitable for the whole family.

The post September Podcast: Exploring Vega’s Neighborhood appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Location: Law Library- TL787.Y43 2016

Location: Special Collections Hevelin Collection- PS3551.N515A9 1978b

Location: Special Collections Hevelin Collection- PS3560.O4864S65 1952

Location: Special Collections x-Collection- TL521.A541485 1968

Location: Special Collections x-Collection- QB500.C87 1989

Location: Special Collections Hevelin Collection- BD511.Y6 1928

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Electronic Resource- 

Location: Electronic Resource- 

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Location: Law Electronic Resource- 

September's partial lunar eclipse will be the first and only time the Moon ducks into Earth's umbral shadow in 2024. The Moon also occults Saturn and hides members of the Pleiades this month.

The post Harvest Moon Takes a Quick Dip in Earth's Shadow for a Partial Lunar Eclipse appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

As Saturn's rings narrow, now's the time for its moons to shine.

The post See Mutual Events, Close Approaches of Saturn's Moons appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

The aurora may be visible across much of the U.S. tonight in the wake of dual solar blasts.

The post Severe Geomagnetic Storm Triggers Widespread Aurora October 10-11 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Travel to the faraway and long ago by riding a quasar's beam.

The post Find a Quasar in the Sky Tonight and Time Travel to the Early Universe appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Fading Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS poses high in a moonless sky for its fans with binoculars and telescopes, even as we wave farewell for at least a hundred thousand years, maybe forever. Meanwhile four brighter, more permanent members of the solar system await attention.

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, October 25 – November 3 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

November’s night skies feature a cluster of prominent constellations led by a celestial queen. Our guided audio tour tells you how to identify them, along with tips for spotting all five bright planets and three meteor showers.

The post November Podcast: Cassiopeia & Company appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

The thin crescent Moon pairs beautifully with Venus low in Monday's twilight. And be on the lookout for any Taurid fireballs this week!

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, November 1 – 10 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Astronomers have, for the first time, mapped the 3D filamentary structure of a famous dandelion-shaped supernova remnant.

The post Astronomers Map a Dandelion Supernova appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Scientists have found possibly the oldest and largest crater on Venus — and it's like none they've ever seen on our sister planet.

The post Oldest and Largest Impact Crater Found on Venus appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

The stars betray that we've tipped from the season of warm evenings to the cold (or at least crisp). And the Moon this week skims Saturn, then the Pleiades.

The post This Week's Sky at a Glance, November 8 – 17 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

The Arecibo Observatory’s radar system may have produced currents that weakened the zinc sockets holding the cables in place, new report says.

The post Arecibo’s Powerful Radar May Have Contributed to the Telescope’s Demise appeared first on Sky & Telescope.

Coalition Senate floor alert in opposition to California SB-1081

The California Senate will vote this week on a bill to automatically register register draft-age applicants for driver’s licenses and state IDs with the Selective Service System for a possible future military draft.

The floor vote in the state Senate on SB-1081 is expected this week and could come at any time.

[Update: The Senate voted 23-2 in favor of SB-1081, with 15 Senators not voting. The Senate approved minor amendments to the bill by its author, which make the bill somewhat worse. The bill now goes to the state Assembly Committee on Transportation, where it is scheduled for a hearing on Monday, 1 July 2024. See this letter to the Assembly Transportation Committee in opposition to the current version of SB-1081.]

SB-1081 was held in the 'suspense' file by the Senate Appropriations Committee, but was called up and sent to the floor for a vote by the full state Senate despite both Democratic and Republican opposing votes in committee, with only minor amendments that fail to assuage any of the opponents of the bill.

As amended, SB-1081 is still opposed by a diverse coalition including the ACLU, the California Immigrant Policy Center, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild.

[Excerpt from the summary released by the Senate Armed Services Committee of the version of the NDAA for FY 2025 approved by the SASC and to be voted on by the full Senate.]

A proposal to expand registration for a possible military draft to young women as well as young men is moving forward again this year in Congress, along with a seductively simple-seeming but in practice unfeasible proposal to switch from the current system in which young men are required to register with the Selective Service System (SSS) to a system in which the SSS tries to identify and locate everyone eligible for a future draft and automatically register them based on other existing Federal databases from the Social Security Administration, IRS, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, etc.

Today both the U.S. Senate Armed Service Committee and the full U.S. House of Representatives approved different proposals to expand and/or make it harder to avoid the requirement for men ages 18-26 to register with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft.

The proposals for changes to Selective Service registration were approved during consideration of the Senate and House versions of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025, a "must-pass" annual bill that typically runs to more than a thousand pages.

The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) approved a version of the NDAA that would expand Selective Service registration to include young women as well as young men. This version of the NDAA will now go to the floor as the starting point for consideration and approval by the full Senate.

Also today the full House of Representatives approved a different version of the NDAA that would make Selective Service registration automatic while keeping it for men only.

A House amendment proposed by Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH), a West Point graduate and Army veteran, which would have replaced the provision to make draft registration automatic with a provision to repeal the Military Selective Service Act, was not "made in order" by the Rules Committee to be considered or voted on by the full House. There was no separate House floor vote on the proposed change to Selective Service registration, only a single vote on the entirety of the NDAA as a package.

The SASC markup was conducted in closed session, and only a summary of highlights of the version adopted by the SASC was released. It's not clear whether the SASC version also includes the provision in the House version of the NDAA to try to make Selective Service registration 'automatic' or only the provision to expand the registration requirement (with which compliance is currently low) to young women as well as young men. A spokesperson for the SASC told The Hill today that the full text of the Senate version of the NDAA won't be released until sometime in July.

Floor amendments are still possible in the Senate before it approves its version of the NDAA. But as of now, it seems likely that competing bad proposals with respect to expansion and/or attempted enforcement through automation of Selective Service -- one from the Republican-majority House to try to make it automatic, and one from the Democratic-majority Senate to expand it to women -- will be included in the House and Senate versions of the NDAA and go to the eventual House-Senate conference committee to sort out in closed-door negotiations late this year, after the elections.

It's possible that either or both of these proposals were included as "bargaining chips" intended to be withdrawn in exchange for concessions on other issues during the conference negotiations. The conference committee could include either, neither, both, or some other compromise on Selective Service in its final package of compromises, which typically are voted on and approved "en bloc" without further amendments.

Either of these misguided proposals would be the most significant change to the Military Selective Service Act since 1980. There have been no hearings, debate, or recorded vote on either of these proposals, and there appear unlikely to be any. The decision will probably be made in secret by the House-Senate conference committee for the NDAA.

[First published on Antiwar.com.]

[“I have an amendment at the desk.” Rep. Chrissy Houlahan introduces a proposal from the Selective Service System to automate draft registration in the House Armed Services Committee, May 22, 2024.]

Under fire for proposing an ill-considered amendment to this year’s National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to “automatically” register all young men in the U.S. for a possible military draft, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) has issued a statement that casts more doubt on her understanding of the current draft law and on the wisdom of her proposed changes to Selective Service registration.

Rep. Houlahan starts by claiming that “This new legislation saves taxpayers significant money.” But there’s absolutely no evidence to support this claim.

A proposal to automatically register applicants for California driver's licenses with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft was pulled by its author, Sen. Bob Archuleta (D-Pico Rivera), just before a scheduled hearing today in the state Assembly Transportation Committee. This was the last scheduled meeting of that committee before the deadline for consideration of bills in this year's legislative session, so the bill is effectively dead for the year.

Like similar laws in other states, California SB-1081 faced opposition from a coalition of peace, civil liberties, and immigrant rights organizations, on both policy and fiscal grounds. Pulling the bill before the hearing today was a face-saving way for Sen. Archuleta to avoid a vote by the committee not to advance his bill to the Assembly floor. This was at least the seventh time that similar proposals in California have been rejected, but the Selective Service System and its California state directors keep finding new sponsors to reintroduce them in the state legislature.

Meanwhile, however, an ill-considered proposal to try to automate draft registration introduced at the instigation of the Selective Service System by Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-PA) remains under consideration as part of the House version of this year's National Defense [sic] Authorization Act (NDAA), along with a proposal to expand draft registration to include young women as well as young men in the Senate version of the NDAA.

There's a chance that both of these proposals for changes to Selective Service registration could be removed during back-room negotiations in the House-Senate conference committee on the NDAA later this year, after the elections. But we've seen this movie before. These bad ideas will be back again next year, regardless of which party wins which federal elections.

Preparation for a military draft, and reliance on the perceived availability of a fallback draft as the basis for planning of endless, unlimited, unpopular wars, won't stop until Congress repeals the Military Selective Service Act and ends draft registration entirely, either through a standalone bill like the Selective Service Repeal Act or through a provision in this or a future year's NDAA.

[Originally published by Responsible Statecraft, the journal of the Quincy Institute]

How did this suddenly become the summer of “the draft”?

There are a number of proposals in the annual defense policy bill (National Defense Authorization Act, NDAA) that deal with the subject. There is one to expand Selective Service registration to women. Another that would make Selective Service registration for American men "automatic."

Still another proposed amendment to the NDAA, which has also been introduced as a freestanding bill, S. 4881, would repeal the Military Selective Service Act entirely. Meanwhile, the Center for a New American Security just published an exhaustive blueprint for modernizing mobilization, including readiness to activate conscription.

All this talk has compelled “fact checkers” to insist that no, the U.S. government isn’t suddenly "laying the groundwork" for a draft.

But saying the U.S. isn’t preparing for a draft is like saying it isn’t preparing for nuclear war. Just as the Department of Defense is tasked with maintaining readiness to initiate nuclear strikes whenever the Commander-In-Chief so orders, the Selective Service System has the sole mission of maintaining readiness to hold a draft lottery within five days and start selecting draftees and sending out notices to report for induction whenever Congress and the President so order.

As such, there are currently ten thousand draft board members who have been appointed and trained to adjudicate claims for deferment or exemption. As recently as this month, states have been openly seeking volunteers to fill empty slots. And both the SSS and hawkish think-tanks have been war-gaming the government’s contingency plans to activate a draft.

[Timeline for a draft, counting from “Mobilization Day” (M=0), from SSS Agency Response Plan (ARP) Workshop (September 7, 2023)]

There’s room for argument about how likely it is that the U.S. would launch nuclear missiles or activate a draft. But there’s no question that it’s planning and preparing for both, as it has been for decades. It would seem that after years of atrophy, the government is stepping up its attention to military mobilization and readiness for a draft.

Maybe it’s time to ask whether more easy and efficient ways of tapping into human capital for war make it easier to get into one and whether it is in our best interest to do so.

Library - Art Library, Location - OSIZ, Call number - FOLIO ND621.V5 H63 2015

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