brainwagon

NASA has released a series of Earth images entitled Blue Marble Next Generation, which includes maps of the entire earth rendered without clouds in each f the 12 months of the year and resolutions of 2km per pixel. Very nice.

Heh. Courtesy of Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog.

Today’s Gutenberg Gem is a neat little astronomy book, published in 1873 by Richard A. Proctor. It lists a number of half hour tours of the sky, each highlighting either a set of constellations or planets. It’s pretty brief, and certainly better modern guides exist, but it’s still a neat little thing to peruse through, […]

Well, it’s hardly surprising, given that you can (with a little effort) stand them on end pretty much every day of the year. But today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day features Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait demonstrating that egg stability seems to be unphased by changes in the seasons. Still, today marks the beginning of fall. […]

In a thread on Slashdot on calculating spacecraft trajectories to Mars some helpful individual pointed at Shane Ross’ Dynamics, Control & Computation page. Lots of good information on celestial mechanics.

This weekend marks the annual return of the Tears of Saint Lawrence: better known to those of us in the amateur astronomy community as the Perseid Meteor shower. If you haven’t trekked out somewhere dark recently to gaze at the annual shower, try reading Sky and Telescope magazine’s coverage. The sky will be moonless, so […]

Check out this movie of the impactor as viewed from the flyby spacecraft. Cool.

Tonight the Deep Impact space probe impacted Comet Tempel 1. I’m watching the coverage life on NASA TV. We can expect to see a photo from the flyby space craft to be all over the front pages tomorrow. Congratulations to all those rocket scientists. Cool stuff.

By way of (gasp!) a useful Slashdot comment, here is a tutorial on deconvolution produced by the NRAO. What can I say? I read stuff like this for fun.

A cool freebie: Free Mag 7 Star Charts distributed under a Creative Commons license. Can’t beat the cost!

Space.com reports that the Spirit rover caught these photos of Mars’ moon Deimos crossing the solar disk: in other words, a Martian solar eclipse. Very cool. You can get a version of the loop here as an mpeg or here as an animated gif. Compare these to my crude transit of Mercury that I recorded […]

Want to own a tiny bit of telescope making history? Check out the Porter Garden Telescope, which according to an email from the owner will be up for sale shortly. There is one currently on display at the Chabot Science Center as well, in case you don’t have the means to pick one up. It […]

In itself, meteorites are not uncommon, but what’s pretty cool is that the Mars rover Opportunity managed to land close to a basketball sized one lying on the surface of Mars. You can read more in NASA’s press release. CMU developed a project to find meteorites in Antartica using an autonomous robot that could search […]

The ESA/JPL has released the tiny image you see to the right and provided us with some background, but this image is as big as it gets: you can’t seem to find a higher resolution image anywhere online. Sigh. Do they only have a camera phone onboard?

The ESA is reporting that the Huygens lander survived it’s descent to Titan, and is transmitting data. According to JPL, the first images should be received around 11:45 PST. Kick ass! As soon as pictures are available, I’ll link ’em up here. Update: In what quite possibly have been the singularly most dull and boring […]