Outdoor activities are very sensitive, especially during the night. You will need a safe harbor where you can put your stuff and sleep comfortably without worrying about night rains or crawling animals. Every beachgoer, hunter or backpacker wants a tent that can be set up and folded within the shortest time possible. Nonetheless, current pop-up tents are different. They might have a few weaknesses, but their ease of setting up makes them some of the best tents that anyone would need. Most of these tents are cheap, portable and lightweight. This article provides you with info on the best pop-up tents in the market.

Gazelle T4 Pop Up Hub Tent

Gazelle is an excellent choice of pop-up tents. Unlike other tents, Gazelle is easy to set up. This is made possible by its cubic shape. Four persons can use it, but it is most comfy when up to 3 persons occupy the space. Setting up involves getting it out of the duffle bag, and tugging the center of all its walls. You will achieve a rigid structure after the poles fall in their place. If you suspect that it is going to rain, the waterproof rainfly can be attached and stacked down. It only takes a maximum of 90 seconds to set up the tent. The maximum size of the canvas, when assembled, is about 8*8 feet. It measures 5 feet long when collapsed, and it is in the shape of a tube with a width of 8 inches. It weighs 30 pounds. The material used to manufacture it is very durable and some of the best in the tent-making industry. These materials are the source of the extra weight. Within the tent, there are smaller storage pockets, larger wall pockets, and gear loft. It has an easily removable floor for more natural cleaning. The windows and the doors are made up of a fine mesh, as well as closures that are watertight to keep away bad weather. YKK zippers are used on the parts that need to be zipped.

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As much as pop-up tents are great outdoor companions due to their ease of set up and adequate space, some people find it hard to fold them up after use. The tent will either need to be stored or transported after the outdoor activity. Therefore, you need to learn some skills on how to fold a pop-up tent. The poles must first be wrapped together and on top of each other, an action that collapses the tent forming a circle. It is then sealed and transported or sealed and stored until it will be needed again. With some of the folding techniques, it becomes easier for everyone to easily and quickly fold the tent until it can be required again.

Skills on how to fold a pop-up tent

Clean It Up Before Folding

In several instances, all that is needed is shaking off the pine needles, or dirt off the tent. This is mainly done when no dirt has stuck in the tent. However, the tent folds are the areas that are most susceptible to dust or debris. Pouring off the debris will require you first to tip the tent. Acquire some powdered laundry detergent and pour it on the canvas. Use a moist rag to clean off the tent and the powder detergent. Nevertheless, the tent should not be stored when dumb to avoid the growth of molds.

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In early 2001, I was a fifth-grader and had been obsessed with our solar system’s planets my entire life. But, thanks in part to the Internet, I came to realize our solar system is more than just the row of planets on my placemat. It is a dynamic system with asteroids, comets, and moons, a lot of moons which look nothing like the one in our sky, each with its own story to tell. I spent countless hours reading about them — the fiery sulfur volcanoes on Io, the nitrogen plumes on Triton, the mysterious ocean of water underneath Europa’s icy crust.

But what was I to make of Saturn’s moons? The best pictures of Titan showed a hazy, orange orb and that was essentially all we knew about it. Enceladus was unusually bright — could that harbor an ocean underneath its ice like Europa? I wondered. Iapetus was oddly two-faced, but the data available was inconclusive as to the nature of the yin and the yang. And were the rest of the moons hiding secrets as well?

I learned that a spacecraft called Cassini was set to orbit Saturn for four years beginning in the summer of 2004. Moreover, a separate probe would detach from the main spacecraft and land on Titan! It was official: for the next three years, no other year in my mind mattered more. The countdown to 2004 had begun.

Cassini teased us with a few distant images of Saturn, but the mission truly started when it made its closest (and only) approach to the small moon Phoebe. The pictures showed, in detail for the first time, a battered, icy moon that likely originated in the Kuiper Belt. A few weeks later, Cassini entered orbit around Saturn, (still) the farthest planet any spacecraft from Earth has orbited. Data and pictures started trickling in at a faster pace. I was buckled up and ready to go for the next four years.

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Donald Trump wants to make America great again, but his election proves America is still “great,” as he defines it.

Our president’s hostility to Mexican immigrants, his travel ban on seven countries, his religious preferences toward refugees fleeing the same butchery, and the chaos he has inflicted upon legal residents are often cast as un-American and not who we are as a people. The Declaration of Independence eloquently affirms “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Surely, many opine, a nation with such a founding creed has no room for a president like Trump.

I disagree.

Consider our history. In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order to forcibly relocate and incarcerate more than 100,000 law-abiding Japanese-Americans. Japan had just attacked the United States, and Roosevelt, justifiably, declared war in return. But the people he locked behind barbed wires had earned their right to live in this country, two-thirds of whom by birth. Their relation to Imperial Japan was nonexistent. Nonetheless, these men, women, and children endured suspicion and hatred from their fellow Americans and from their own government. When the war ended and they finally regained freedom, many returned home only to find that their property had been vandalized and decimated.

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It recently came to my attention that a graph I created and shared on an online forum has become rather popular. Dan Savage, journalists from CNN, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Verge have all shared the graph on Twitter, Facebook, and other websites. See below:

Many people are also asking questions, such as when it was created, why it includes certain names but excludes others, whether or not statements have been cherry-picked, and what I wanted people to take from it. These are all valid questions and, with the launch of this blog, I can now answer them.

When was this graph created?

I created this graph in March 2016, which makes it a couple months old. When I update it, the results will probably not look much different given the large sample size of statements for each listed politician. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had 171 and 111 rated statements, respectively, when this chart was made.

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Astronomers today announced the discovery of a potentially habitable Earth-sized planet orbiting the star closest to the Sun, Proxima Centauri.

Proxima Centauri is 4.24 light-years away. To put that in perspective, the Milky Way galaxy (of which our solar system is a part) is about 100,000 light years across. If trekking the Milky Way from one end to another was equivalent to walking from New York City to California, Proxima Centauri would be within the first 200 yards. So on a cosmic scale, our nearest star is extremely close.

Not much is yet known about this new planet (formally called Proxima Centauri b). Its mass is believed to be between 1.27 and 3 times Earth’s mass, so it probably has a solid surface. Its orbit lies in the habitable zone, which means its surface is capable of supporting liquid water. The star it orbits is a red dwarf, a smaller and different kind of star than our Sun. Beyond these basic facts, many questions about this planet are still unanswered. Does it keep one side always facing its host star? Does it have any moons? Does it have an atmosphere? Does it have liquid water? Does it have life? What kind of life might evolve on such a planet?

These questions will not be answered quickly, but fortunately we will learn more about the planet in the coming years. The European Extremely Large Telescope, currently under construction and planned to be fully functional in 2024, will provide images 16 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope. This telescope will be able to resolve Proxima Centauri b and help study its properties. Moreover, now that astronomers all over the world know exactly where to look, further discoveries about the planet are likely to be made sooner.

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