In today’s Urban Planner: lectures on Earth, the universe, and a chance to look up into the heavens; trophy figurines get the love they deserve; a statistician presents quantitative data to prove or disprove racial differences; and Lady Gaga will try to stir up some controversy at the Air Canada Centre.

It’s not hard to notice a supernova, the massively violent cosmic explosion signaling the death of a star. In the span of a few short weeks, this cosmic flashbulb can shine brighter than entire galaxies. The sheer force of the explosion—think on the order of a million-billion-trillion megatons of TNT—provides enough energy to fuse atomic [...]

The planetarium’s digital projector, which uses a fish-eye lens to render images on the inside of an inflatable dome. In early 2009, the University of Toronto notably bought the disused McLaughlin Planetarium, attached to the south side of the Royal Ontario Museum, for eventual redevelopment—meaning probable demolition. Last summer, less notably, the university purchased a [...]

The image above is a montage of eighty-six separate thirty-second exposures taken on Woodbine Beach in the early hours of Tuesday morning during the Leonid meteor shower. (Each image was loaded into Photoshop and blended with the images below it to build up the star trails and reveal the meteors.) Over the three-quarters of an [...]

Photo of star trails (not meteors), by xbeta, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. The annual Leonid meteor shower will peak in intensity tonight and tomorrow night. This year’s show promises to be an exceptionally spectacular one, by recent standards—but only for those who know how to hide from Toronto’s countless jiggawatts of light pollution. Do [...]

The great August Mars hoax is an annual tradition. Come summer, inboxes around the world start to fill with the same old messages claiming that on August 27, Mars will come so close to the Earth that it will appear as large as the full moon in the night sky. This year, the hoax itself [...]

So, you may have noticed it snowed this weekend. If you don’t believe us, go check out the Toronto Star‘s website, where nine out of ten local stories are about the snow, people dealing with the snow, and celebrities talking about the snow. Notably absent among them: the probable cause for all of this snow. [...]

Or it will be tonight between 10:00 and 10:51 p.m., when there will be a total lunar eclipse over Toronto (and various other cities North America and Western Europe, but 10 p.m. is when it’s happening here). Lunar eclipses may not be as apocalyptic and awe-inspiring as solar eclipses, but they do have the advantage [...]

Starting at 4:51 on Tuesday morning, the moon will turn from white to red and signal the coming of the End of Days, when Satan shall return to torture you sinners for all eternity and the righteous will ascend to Heaven in rapture. Either that, or the Earth’s shadow will fall upon the moon for [...]