Harold Meckler

On a recent hike, while looking out for snakes and occasionally losing all sense of time and place, my thoughts settled on the endless examples of the cycles of life we find all around us. Huge trees, once spectacular, were now broken and decaying, giving life to countless organisms. Bird nests reminded me that, for […]

What’s your sign? I’m born under Sagittarius, the Archer. December. Interestingly, Sagittarius is actually part of our summer sky, rising in the southeast in late May. It is one of the twelve members of the zodiac, the group of constellations that is not only important in astronomy, but also integral to those who follow astrology. […]

We may, now more than ever, desperately need kindness, love, and compassion. I think, however, that humility should come first. A piece of genetic material just a fraction of the width of human hair has killed millions of people in just the past year. The biggest and strongest amongst us is as much at risk […]

For my own sanity, and for the simple fact that so much of the science and math of astronomy are a bit beyond my ability to fully understand and digest, I try to keep this column very straightforward. After all, our own solar system gives plenty to write about, along with the countless number of […]

It was The Night of the Javelina. Earlier, my wife and I, along with our Lab mix, Jersey Girl, had hiked along the Juan Bautista de Anza trail north of Tumacacori. By 10p.m. we were ready to call it quits for the day. The high temperatures had continued into the evening, so we left a […]

One of the great winter constellations is Gemini. Located just a bit north and east from Orion, it leads with the bright, mellow orange star, Pollux. Alongside, bluer, and not as dominant, is his brother Castor. Another eight stars help to give Gemini its shape. Various cultures have provided different names for this grouping, but […]

If it’s alright, let me tell you a story. In the early part of 1963 I was an eight-year-old boy living on the rolling hills of central New Jersey. It was all farmland then, cows, chickens, and endless fields of soy and corn. By bicycle, it was ten minutes to our closest neighbor and probably […]

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I, like so many others, watched events unfold that I knew would forever change us. That evening I found some level of comfort, of distance, in the views generated through the telescope housed at the Flandrau Planetarium on the University of Arizona campus. My effort to postpone this […]

The news feed on my phone is filled with headlines of comets and meteors and newly found galaxies and bursts of radio waves and so many other bits of information that it often seems the stuff of science fiction rather than straight up science. In addition, magazines normally associated with economics and politics are diving […]