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The Day the Earth Stood Still
July 20, 1969: What a day for America —and the world. With one step on a powdery chunk of lunar surface, we achieved the unachievable: Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Few events have had the same impact on our times, according to these five distinguished Americans.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Afterward, anything seemed possible.
I watched the moon landing when I was 10 years old with a friend, on a 12-inch black-and-white TV—with a coat hanger for an antenna ear. Then, the next year, that same friend handed me a pair of binoculars, and I looked at the moon, seemingly for the first time in my life. It no longer was a distant object. I had never noticed before how full of valleys and hills it was.
The Apollo missions were great adventures; every one went a bit farther than the one before. With Apollo 7, we circled the Earth. With Apollo 8, we flew around the moon and saw some of our very first images of the Earth. What a picture! We saw our planet as all land and water and clouds—not color-coded countries and states. After Apollo 11, anything seemed possible. A mission to Mars by 1980? Why not?!
But that didn't happen. The missions ended with Apollo 17 in 1972. So did the sense of adventure. Today, we celebrate this era because, frankly, it's dead and on display at a museum near you. By now, I had hoped we'd be celebrating all of the bigger and better explorations we might have achieved after the day we landed on the moon.
An Educator Shines At the Planetarium, February 13, 2000
IF any students from the Astrophysics 203 class at Princeton University had sneaked into last week's preview of New York's renovated Hayden Planeterium, they would have seen their professor, Neil de Grasse Tyson, fielding questions from a clutch of people.
Standing by the Willamette meteorite—the only stone left unturned in the total revamping—Dr. Tyson, the planetarium director, conducted an impromptu class about...
Stars In His Eyes Over A Pen, March 9, 2003
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON, an astrophysicist and the Frederick P. Rose director of the Hayden Planetarium, is a big guy. He stands 6-foot-2 and has hands that can palm a basketball. He speaks in a booming baritone. In his TriBeCa loft, he ambles around a space with 14-foot ceilings. When he studies the stars, he goes to the tops of mountains like Palomar and Cerro Tololo to look through their powerful telescopes. He thinks big.
He even writes big, with scrolls and flourishes. A calligrapher, he is adept with quill pens made from fluffy ostrich plumes and, lately, a Nightline fountain pen made by the Japanese company Namiki.
This is the pen,he said. . . .
Putting a Milestone in Cosmic Perspective, December 31, 1999
DR. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON is laughing as he scampers down a spiraling ramp of time in the renovated heavens of the Hayden Planetarium, site of the most expensive New Year's Eve fund-raiser in the city. The length of a football field, the ramp represents the 13-billion-year evolution of the universe.
A step or two from the bottom, Dr. Tyson, the planetarium's director and an astrophysicist by training and dreaming, plucks a hair from his visitor's head. On the scale of the ramp, he says,
All human history, from cave drawings on, fits on this strand.And so, teetering near the end of the century, millimoments before the cosmic odometer shifts into a piddly three zeros, we come to Dr. Tyson for perspective. . . .
How Many Planets Do You Want in the Solar System? January 10, 2009
Kenneth Chang asks New York Times readers how many planets they want in the Solar System.
In the previous post about Neil deGrasse Tyson's new book,
The Pluto Filesand the turmoil I had inflicted on his life, I wrote,Now, a year and a half after the International Astronomical Union decision, it seems to me that most people have reached the acceptance stage that there are eight planets in the solar system.One commenter, Laurel Kornfeld, makes it clear that
most peopleis a synonym forcertainly not everyone:Acceptance stage of eight planets in our solar system? You have got to be kidding.She adds another 593 words arguing for Pluto’s planethood. . . .
Pluto's Not a Planet? Only in New York, January 22, 2001
The article by Kenneth Chang form the New York Times that first noted that Pluto was missing from the planets hanging in the Rose Center for Earth and Space.
As she walked past a display of photos of planets at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, Pamela Curtice of Atlanta scrunched her brow, perplexed. There didn't seem to be enough planets. . . .
The TIME 100, April 30, 2007
Included in TIME Magazine's 2007 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
