brainwagon

Well, today is the the vernal equinox, known more informally as the first day of spring.  It’s a blustery, rainy day here, and it probably would have gone unnoticed by me except for the mention on Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog.  The equinoxes are a busy time for Phil, who debunked the idea that on […]

Need some fresh wallpaper for your computer Desktop? Try checking out NASA’s top 10 Pictures, including the rather nice pictures of an active lava flow on Io pictured to the right. Cool stuff. [tags]NASA,Space[/tags]

Reader Bill Harris reminded me that tonight is the night that Stardust, NASA’s comet sample return mission, will return to earth carrying its cargo of aerogel that was exposed to the particles in the wake of Comet P/Wild 2. At 2:12AM PST on Sunday morning, the probe will jettison it’s cargo at 105,000 feet over […]

Courtesy of Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy Blog, here’s a link to a book entitled What’s Up 2006, a collection of astronomy related “projects” that you can do, one for each day of the year. It’s a 13.7 megabyte download, but is over 400 pages. Enjoy! [tags]Astronomy,Amateur Astronomy,Telescope[/tags]

Unnoticed amidst last night’s revelry was the passage of a scheduled leap second. If you ever wanted to know more about them, you could review the U.S. Naval Observatory page on Leap Seconds. After reading this page, you should be able to understand why the insertion of a leap second does not mean that the […]

Check out the the spiffy view of Saturn’s rings and their shadows taken from Cassini.

Sadly, it won’t be visible here in California, but for much of the United States, Christmas morning will feature a rare occultation of Spica by the moon. Thanks to Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog for pointing out the rare event which, well, sadly won’t be seen from here.

Last night I watched the final episode of Survivor Guatamala (yeah, I know, reality television is the opiate of the masses, so sue me) and I spotted something that made me stop the TiVo, rewind, and note something to my wife. The particular video shot is one of their classic “night vision” pictures of one […]

Some of you may remember hearing the story about Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin punching some lunatic who was trying to badger him into swearing on the Bible that he really did land on the moon. That was Bart Sibrel, and he’s gonna be on the radio today to sell his brand of bullflop on 97.1 […]

This rather wacky report talks about the possibility that ETs could infect the earth’s computers with viruses by transmitting certain signals which cause (say) buffer overflows in our computers and infect the internet. Dr. Carrigan thinks that the SETI scientists should implement some kind of decontamination procedure to clean the signals before they are distributed. […]

The Saturn probe Cassini snapped another nice photo of Mimas using the narrow-angle camera on October 13, 2005. It’s very nice, even if the sight of it does cause the rebel forces on Alderon to quake in their boots. Addendum: Mimas has been mentioned here before.

Over the last couple of days I managed to skim a bunch of reports that scientists had discovered the light from stars which formed only 200 million years after the Big Bang, but the matter seemed pretty dry and uninteresting. But try reading Phil Plait’s account of the discovery. Not only does Phil do an […]

Breaking news from Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog: Pluto has two previously undiscovered moons circling it. Neat! Nice press release, go read it.

I haven’t blogged too much about things having to do with astronomy as of late, but last Friday I took time out of my normal telescope making activities to actually stare through one: actually the 8″ Alvan Clark refractor (nicknamed Leah) that’s at the Chabot Space and Science Center. Mars is currently closing on its […]

Courtesy of the Bad Astronomy Blog, some very nice images of our closest galactic neighbor M31, the Andromeda Galaxy taken with the Spitzer telescope in infrared. It shows a great deal of detail which is missing from visible light photographs. Very nice. (Okay, okay, there are the Magellenic clouds, and other dwarf galaxies that are […]