Space

First Un-Manned Berthing At Harmony Of The International Space Station

"It looks, just looks fantastic," said Nicole Stott of the "very shiny ball HTV" in the "beautiful view." The United States astronaut was looking through the windows as she spoke to Houston before she and other flight enginee ...

Blog Post - Hatice Cullingford - Sep 18 2009 - 7:01pm

Students from Around the World Monitor LCROSS for NASA

In a little more than two weeks, NASA will have an expensive hunk of metal slam into the Moon... the resulting plume will be closely observed in hopes to learn more about the possibility of the existence of water ice (read more and learn about how you can ...

Blog Post - Matthew T. Dearing - Sep 21 2009 - 11:41pm

GigaGalaxy Zoom- An Amateur Telescope Look At The Milky Way

Stéphane Guisard, world-renowned astrophotographer and ESO engineer, has created a  340-million-pixel, 34 by 20-degree wide image from Paranal, the site of the Very Large Telescope, as it looks through an amateur telescope. Guisard is head of the optical e ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 22 2009 - 1:30am

Astronomy Hero, The New PS3 Game!

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 evading clouds.  Different targets appear at d ...

Article - Alex "Sandy" Antunes - Sep 25 2009 - 9:00pm

Solar Surprise: High-Speed Wind Brings Energy Even When Sunspots Are Few

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 that lower temperatures (and higher ones) may correspon ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 27 2009 - 12:08pm

Cosmic Flash Memory

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 and lift in earth's gravitational field. A ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Sep 27 2009 - 11:57pm

Ram Pressure Stripping And How Two Galaxies In The Virgo Cluster Are Just Losing It

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 and, as galaxies move through this intra-cluster medium, strong ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 30 2009 - 7:00am

Water On Moon & Mars Is A Game-Changer

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 liters) of water and start walking.  What's the heaviest part of your ge ...

Article - Alex "Sandy" Antunes - Sep 29 2009 - 12:25pm

Baryon Oscillations And The Search For Dark Energy

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 oscillations began when pressure waves travelled through ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 1 2009 - 12:00pm

Dark Matter: The Plot Thickens

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 otherwise undetectable? Could it be that w ...

Article - Johannes Koelman - Oct 3 2009 - 11:01am