I have a cold, yet EldestOne needs transporting to his debate competition. Iron Chef has a new postdoc over at the RAH, Selenium Gal has won a prestigious award for her honours project, and is now doing a PhD, Frog Lady is also doin...

A wave of reports is coming in from the town of Euclid, Ohio, from folks there who are seeing a mysterious light hovering over Lake Erie and Cleveland. The light, they say, is very bright, lasts for a couple of hours, stays near the...

Have a good look at this star. For astronomers have discovered that it is on course to collide with the outskirts of our solar system with potentially catastrophic consequences. New calculations show that the orange dwarf, called ...

[This is an update to my previous post, Texas conservatives screw history, so you should read that first to get your blood to a rapid boil before reading this.] The Texas State Board of Education member Don McLeroy — creationist, an...

I recently posted that Don McLeroy, a Texas conservative creationist buffoon on the State School Board of Education, lost his re-election bid. That was good news, but I also warned that in his last months on the BoE, lots of damage ...

This is very cool: a guy got a grant to comb through satellite imagery to look for terrestrial craters, and found one hidden in plain sight! The Planetary Society has all the details. The man who found it studied geology in college,...

Carnival of Space #145 is now up at Crowlspace. We have crafty telescope builders, handling real bits of the Moon, how impacts form, the 150 kiloton Jules Verne Nuclear Cannon (seriously), volcanoes on Io and much much more. Shoot o...

Gliese 710 hurtles towards an unsuspecting Sun (which is too dim to be seen in this Celestia image)Passed on by commenter JupiterIsBig. Be afraid, be .. somewhat afraid.. for the star Gliese 710 is hurtling our way and will cause a ...

Simon Singh is one of my (very few) heroes. He is a journalist who has been fighting not just the British Chiropractic Association (who is suing Simon for libel) but also the awful UK libel laws themselves. You can catch up with all...

Here I am in Heidelberg for another Virtual Observatory meeting. Nice place. Pleasant journey, apart from German Bloke With Kilt at Edinburgh airport. Normally, one sees kilts in two circumstances. First, young Scottish chaps at wed...

Now here is an unusual image of Phobos, Mars' moon. We are looking onto the side of Phobos that faces away from Mars. ESA's Mars Express is the only spacecraft currently in Mars orbit -- the only one since the Viking orbiters -- t...

A few months ago, I wrote about an art exhibit in NYC based on my book Death from the Skies! Brian George, one of the artists who put this exhibit together, just posted a very cool blog entry about it too. He posted some great pict...

Phobos in 3D. Image Credit ESA.It's been a bit of a wait, but the ESA have released the Phobos Flyby images. There's high resolution images of Phobos, in normal and 3D versions (the example is a red-green anaglyph at medium resoluti...

The big effort in the House this week is to pass a health care reform bill, but that doesn’t mean that space can’t figure into the mix. The Orlando Sentinel reported that Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-FL) brought up the subject in a meeti...

Today is the bonanza day for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter: the first formal release of orbiter data happened this morning, including 10 Terabytes (that is 10 million Megabytes!) of camera data. I am in the middle of writing a lengt...

Image Credit: NOAO / KPNO Today marks the 50th anniversary of the official dedication of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, one of the world's largest collection of telescopes about 60 miles southwest of Tucson, Arizona.  Prior...

This. Is. AWESOME!!! That is a model of the USS Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation, created using an ion beam that guides vaporized chemicals and deposits them into a given shape. The amazing thing is that this model...

As I promised a little while back, the European Space Agency has released new extremely high-res pictures of Phobos, one of the moons of Mars! Check this out: Yegads. Click to embiggen, and see this in all its glory. This image, ta...

  G. Neukum / FU Berlin / DLR / ESA   Use red-blue glasses to get a 3-D view of Phobos, and click on the image for a larger version. Fresh imagery from Europe's Mars Express orbiter shows the Martian moon Phobos in sharp, 3...

Silicon.com: The new face of biometrics ... nose scans BBC: Moon astronauts disappointed by NASA plan New York Times: To stop crime, share your genes Telegraph: Search is on for 'Death Star' Crowlspace: Carnival of Space 145 ...(...