brainwagon

The Cassini probe has taken some awfully nice pictures, including this one of the moon Iapetus. The equatorial ridge is really very odd. The most unique, and perhaps most remarkable feature discovered on Iapetus in Cassini images is a topographic ridge that coincides almost exactly with the geographic equator. The ridge is conspicuous in the […]

NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day has a very nice picture of Comet Machholz crossing the Pleides, or Seven Sisters. Subaru owners might find this group of stars particularly interesting.

Nasa has a nice website describing the current Geminid meteor shower. It’s overcast here, so little chance of catching any meteors here, but perhaps things are better where you are at. Keep looking up.

Today’s cool bit of software is Stellarium: a realistic sky simulator available for both Windows and Linux and Mac OS X (thanks mneptok!). While it is unlikely to fufill the needs of a serious observer of the heavens, it is a dead simple application which provides beautiful views of both the day and night skies. […]

Those clever lads and lasses at Metafilter had a very cool link to Isabel Gill’s Six Months in Ascension, written in 1877. Sir David Gill went to the island to observe Mars to determine its distance from the sun more accurately, and his wife Isabel went along to help out. This peek into a Victorian […]

After a seven year, 2.2 billion year trip, the Cassini spacecraft completed its SOI burn and entered Saturn orbit. Check out the details on CNN.com or review the project homepage. During its lifetime, Cassini is supposed to relay over three hundred thousand pictures of Saturn and its surrounding moons. Let the wallpaper downloading commence!

Well, this rare event has concluded, I’ll try to add links to sites with images throughout the day as my browsing uncovers them. Check back later for more… Live Images of the Transit of Venus 2004 Article from Sky & Telescope Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Institute for Solar Physics has some close up H-α […]