Astronomy - USA (2021-12)

6 ASTRONOMY • DECEMBER 2021

ASTRO LETTERS

A new light on Apollo

I’ve been enjoying your 50th

anniversary article series on the

Apollo lunar landings these last

several years. Many of the his-

torical details and photographs

are new to me, and the two

essays in the July issue on Apollo

15 did not disappoint. The photo

of the crescent Earth rising

above the Moon’s limb, which I

had never seen before, was mesmerizing. Thank you for

sharing it with us! — Justin Soutar, Goshen, VA

Farewell, Arecibo

Your article in the August

issue on the Arecibo

Observatory was excellent!

I usually like the hard sci-

ence articles, but this one

showed the very human side of doing astronomy in

an observatory family. It was wonderful that the article

was based upon the observations of the actual scientists

there and not just written about Arecibo. In fact

(though I am not a scientist), when I read the article, I

found myself crying a bit along with Daniel Altschuler’s

account. A superlative and moving article! Keep up this

excellent publication. — Robert Walty, Stephens City, VA

Predicting the future

Very nice coverage of NASA’s current Perseverance and

Ingenuity missions. As it happens, I recently watched

the 2000 movie Red Planet. The mission included a

rover with a helicopter. The rover was more like a

robotic panther, but the helicopter was a dead ringer

for Ingenuity. Was sci-fi predicting the future again?

— Jay Kaknes, Stowe, VT

Corrections

Our September story “The next 20 years of solar eclipses”

listed the wrong information for the Dec. 4, 2021 eclipse.

(The information provided was for the Dec. 14, 2020,

total solar eclipse.) The Dec. 4, 2021, eclipse will be total

only over Antarctica and the nearby ocean; see “A total

solar eclipse over Antarctica” on page 44.

Crew members of
Apollo 15 on the first
lunar rover. NASA

We welcome

your comments

at Astronomy Letters,
P.O. Box 1612,

Waukesha, WI 53187;

or email to letters@
astronomy.com.

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name, city, state, and
country. Letters may

be edited for space

and clarity.

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