Space

I now own half a satellite... and in a way, you do to.  The Scientific Blogging "Project Calliope" satellite order has been placed!  Thanks to Hank's SB contribution, we have the 'science'…

Want a chance to see the water on the moon in real life? Wake up early Friday morning (if you live in the Americas), and get out your telescope. NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite…

Just why do we have a space station, anyway? That's a question of relevance, because it turns out we might not have one after 2015. The International Space Science Station (ISS) is a football-field…

An article in this week's edition of Nature adds to the mysteries surrounding 'dark matter'. Should we abandon this enigmatic concept of invisible matter that exerts gravitational attraction but is…

Is 'dark energy', the mysterious unidentified thing that would be a nice explanation for a lot of universal questions, physics or religion?  Maybe baryon oscillations can tell us.   Baryon…

There's drama in two galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, NGC 4522 and NGC 4402.    An extremely hot X-ray emitting gas known as the intra-cluster medium lurks between galaxies within clusters…

Here's an experiment.  Prepare for 3 days of hiking.  Pack light-- sleeping bag, tarp, knife, matches.  Bring protein bars and rice for food.  And then pick up 3 gallons (11…

Take a decently sized housecat. Let's say a cat that is well-fed and weights 7.5 kilograms. We can all comprehend such a mass. It's not too small, neither too big. A cat is something we can pick up…

New research says that sunspots provide an incomplete measure of changes in the sun's impact on Earth over the course of the 11-year solar cycle - good news for global warming proponents concerned…

I'm torn.  There's two ways I would make a new smash video game, "Astronomy Hero". In the first, you are doing night observing runs, trying to accumulate enough light from each target while…