Welcome back, coding astronauts! Today we'll journey through data retrieval in MongoDB, focusing on querying, sorting, and projecting techniques. Armed with these tools, our navigations through the database universe will become more efficient and precise.

First, we'll delve into querying, which you can think of as using a telescope to pinpoint a star. In our case, find() in Mongoose acts as our telescope. Suppose we have 'users' posting 'thoughts', represented by a Post model, and we want to find posts with likesCount exceeding 10. Here's how we can accomplish this:

In the above code, $gt is an operator that finds numbers greater than 10.

In MongoDB, there exist special keywords that enable us to carry out actions such as comparing values or checking ranges. Here are a few of them:

• $eq: Matches values that are equal to a specified value.
• $gt: Matches values that are greater than a specified value.