Book Reading List - 2020

• Killing Crazy Horse: The Merciless Indian Wars in America - Author: Bill O’Reilly & Robert Petkoff
• The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America - Author: Timothy Egan
• Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man - Author: Mary L. Trump PhD
• The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark - Author: Carl Sagan
• Nine Years Among the Indians - Author: Herman Lehman
• Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher - The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis
• A People’s History of the United States - Author: Jeff Zinn
• The Water Dancer - Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Body - Author: Bill Bryson
• Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith - Author: Timothy Egan
• Thanks, Obama - My Hopey, Changey White House Years - Author: David Litt
• A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America - Author: Phillip Rucker & Carol Leonnig
• A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir - Author: Donald Worster
• Bill Bryson's Appliance of Science - Author: Bill Bryson

Winter Solstice - Haiku

This Winter Solstice •

Shortest day and longest night • 

Of the darkest year

This winter solstice will also mark the great conjunction when Jupiter and Saturn will be conspicuous in the western sky just after sunset and will be only 0.1 degree apart at the exact moment of the conjunction. Astronomers use the word conjunction to describe meetings of planets and other objects on our sky’s dome. They use the term great conjunction to describe meetings of Jupiter and Saturn, which are the two biggest worlds in our solar system. Though the two planets will appear spectacularly close together on the sky’s dome now, Jupiter and Saturn are actually 456 million miles (734,000 million km) apart. Saturn is nearly twice as far away as Jupiter.

Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions happen every 20 years; the last one was in the year 2000. But these conjunctions aren’t all equal. The 2020 great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn will be the closest since 1623 and the closest observable since 1226! 2020’s extra-close Jupiter-Saturn conjunction won’t be matched again until the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of March 15, 2080.
Source: EarthSky.org