And now for something slightly different. One of my favourite Monty Python songs of all time is the Galaxy Song. It occurs near the end of the film The Meaning of Life with a pink-suited Eric Idle climbing out of a kitchen fridge. He then leads Mrs Brown - a hair roller clad lady whose husband is donating his organs - into space and gives her a tour of the universe to demonstrate how utterly insignificant we are compared to the enormity of space.
What I find so brilliant about the Galaxy Song is that, not only does it make our insignificance sound so cheery, it contains a huge number of astronomical numbers that are good enough for back-of-the-envelope calculations. In fact, the figures used are close enough to accepted values that as an undergraduate I used them in order-of-magnitude calculations all the time. Even today I still replay the song in my head to remind me of the rough diameter of our galaxy, the orbital speed of the Earth around the Sun and the speed of light in miles per minute. So, without further ado, I leave you with this from the Monty Python YouTube Channel (spotted via Dave P's tweet).
The Carnival of Space is now up to week 79 and still going strong. Head on over to One Astronomer's Noise for talk of space exploration, Paris Hilton (no, really), opal on Mars and a complete round up of all the exoplanet news from this week.
In case you happen to have missed it, the Shuttle is about to launch from the Kennedy Space Centre in a matter of about three minutes. Catch it on NASA TV. There was an issue with a loose latch on a door but they've decided that it should be OK and they are go for launch.
Funnily enough I was looking at a picture of Fomalhaut's dust disc at Halloween a couple of weeks ago. I suggest the new planet orbiting Fomalhaut be named Planet Sauron.
Image taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the newly discovered planet, Fomalhaut b, orbiting its parent star, Fomalhaut. CREDIT: NASA, ESA and P. Kalas (University of California, Berkeley, USA)
I've been going through my digital photographs recently and thought I would share this shot from June 2004. It shows Earth's Moon seen from a plane window somewhere over northern Europe. It might make a nice desktop wallpaper (click the image for a 1280x960px version).
Moon and Clouds seen over northern Europe in June 2004. CREDIT: Stuart
