Dokimasia

🔭 The Night Sky

Planets, stars and the deep dark beyond.

Realm: Planets & moons (25) · Stars & constellations (24) · Galaxies & deep sky (19) · Missions & exploration (22) · Terms & phenomena (20).

The night sky keeps the oldest records, and this bank reads them back: one hundred and ten questions across five realms of the dark. Planets and moons open the proceedings — the hottest planet is not the closest one, and the question knows you know it — before the bank steps outward to stars and constellations, where Antares burns at the heart of Scorpius and the Great Square anchors a winged horse. Galaxies and deep-sky objects follow, Andromeda and the nebulae, then the missions: the probes and programmes that turned astronomy into exploration, from the Voyagers still calling home to the telescope that unfolded itself a million miles out. The final realm is terms and phenomena — what a parallax actually measures, what makes a supernova a type and not just a tragedy. The best question in the bank concerns Neptune, the planet discovered in 1846 exactly where mathematics said it must be: astronomy's finest hour fitted into a single line. The Night Sky also supplies the society's daily examination with its starriest questions, so practice here pays compound interest. Half the bank is medium difficulty, honest work for anyone who reads past headlines; the hard band reaches for catalogue numbers and the order of lunar maria. Five questions a round, the universe per sitting.