NASA focuses on climate science in 'A Warming World'
Cracked: Six bad-ass robots invented before electricity
Improbable.com: The latest on old dinosaur beliefs
Discover Magazine: The man who builds brains ...(read more)
Is this the face of an alien?
According to a new study, the answer is probably yes.
That’s Palomar 5, a globular cluster very roughly 75,000 light years away. Globulars are ball-shaped collections of hundreds of thousands of stars, and surround many large galaxies, kinda like bees swarming around a hive. There are at least 150 [...]Solar Stormwatch: Help scientists spot the sun's blasts Gizmag: Gold nanoparticles turn light into current Swinburne: Alien invaders pack the Milky Way Astroblog: Carnival of Space 142 ...(read more)
A vast coronal mass ejection blasts away from the Sun. Credit: NASA/ESA/SOHO
In August last year I wrote a feature for Sky at Night Magazine about how you could help STEREO mission scientists search for the building blocks of the object, known as Theia, that’s thought to have formed the Moon when it collided with the [...]
NASA has just released the first batch of images taken by the WISE spacecraft showing several astronomical objects glowing at infrared wavelengths. The level of detail in those images is really quite impressive. They got me thinking about the best infrared images of celestial subjects that I’ve seen in recent years.
Infrared telescopes are vital tools [...]
Looking at Tom’s excellent post on Mimas, I can’t help but be drawn to its most prominent feature, the crater Herschel. It’s almost unbelievable that the impact responsible for that didn’t completely destroy the moon. Here are some other images of Herschel put up on the Cassini website:
If Earth were to carry a crater of [...]
On February 13, 2010 the Cassini spacecraft made a close pass at the Saturn moon Mimas. The image above was taken from about 70,600 km (~ 43,680 miles).
The main feature that just sticks out is the huge impact crater called Hershel, so named for William Herschel the discoverer of Mimas (on September 17, 1789). Mimas [...]
That’s right! There is now a new way to keep up to date with all the things we should be doing, but probably aren’t…the Slacker Astronomy Fan Page on facebook. You can find us here.
Found this poster print and a bunch of other funny stuff at Despair.com. This one jumped right out at me because of the title. We’re all about exerting half the effort, well, at least half of the time.
But do not “despair”. We have several new podcasts coming up in the next few days.
One of the nice things about publishing an astronomy blog is we get copies of astronomy books from various publishers sent to us to review. Just before Christmas Cambridge University Press sent us a copy of the eighth edition of Ian Ridpath and Wil Tirion’s ‘The Monthly Sky Guide’.
This book is a classic beginner level [...]