... few weeks ago, International Space Station astronaut Soichi Noguchi took an amazing picture of Endeavour re-entering Earth's atmosphere. He has been busily snapping away at the Earth and posting the pictures on his Twitter feed. You really should be following him!Recently, he unknowingly did me a big favor by posting this incredible shot of
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Via Emily at the Planetary Society blog comes this amazing animation, a three-dimensional flyover of Candor Chasma on Mars generated using HiRISE data. Holy cow. And the timing of this video… will some kid in middle school watch this video, wonder what it would be like to really do this, and then, in 25 more
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The Cassini spacecraft recently passed very near the tiny moon Helene and returned amazing pictures of it. Helene is a dinky iceball, only about 36×32x30 km (22×19x18 miles) in size (this picture has an incredible resolution of about 113 meters (103 yards) per pixel). It circles Saturn in the same orbit as the much larger Dione,
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Every time a psychic gets surprised by something, the world gets a little smarter. I hope. If that's true, then our collective IQ went up a solid 8 points when the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a suit against "America's Prophet" Sean David Morton on claims he's a big ol' phony. If only he had spelled it
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How often do you go outside and look up? I mean really, just look up at the sky and stars?With more and more people living in cities, and light pollution still a major problem, it seems that a smaller percentage of people actually get to see the stars. That's why the National Optical Astronomy Observatory
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Starting tonight on the BBC, a new series premiers called "Wonders of the Solar System". The host is some guy named Brian Cox. He's a particle physicist! I don't see the BBC hiring me to do a show on the Large Hadron Collider, so this doesn't seem fair. And I'm a little concerned about how
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... am pleased to write that the creationist and generally anti-reality Don McLeroy has lost his bid for re-election to the Texas State Board of Education!Yay!The man who ousted him is Thomas Ratliff, who is — gasp! — an actual educator who has vowed to try to remove the politicization of the board and also
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Need a little bit of jaw-droppiness today? Mwuahahaha. Let me show you something:a hole in the Moon.[Don't tell anyone, but that's where they faked the Moon landings!]This is an image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of my favorite spacecraft in existence. It's been mapping the Moon at an incredible 50 cm/pixel resolution — that's
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I've said this before, but it bears repeating: when I was a kid, Mars was a dead planet. Dry, frozen, with hardly any atmosphere, I always figured it wasn't very interesting. Heh. Mars may or may not be alive in the biological sense, but it's certainly active geologically! And images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera
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... love numbers. I have a decent grasp of them, including orders-of-magnitude: the idea that 1000 is ten times 100, and so on. This comes from long, long experience, especially in astronomy. Also, writing a book where the last chapter deals in practical terms with numbers like 1092 years kinda gives you a serious feel
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This is awesome. Straight Outta Vulcan by ~tetsuoshima on deviantARTAlso, logical.
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I'm very excited to announce the advent of SETIcon, a convention about astronomy, SETI, and Star Trek!Yeah, you read that right. SETIcon guests will include many astronomers from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, including David Morrison, Seth Shostak, Frank Drake, and Jill Tarter. Other astronomers will include my friends Alex Filippenko, Debra Fischer, and Kevin
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Three iPhone apps recently came out that pertain to some favorite topics on this blog, so here's a quick roundup of them. 1) John Cook, like me, got tired of hearing the same old long-debunked claims from global warming deniers being used over and over again, so he created an app debunking these claims. Called Skeptical
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Our planet is a weird place. I can imagine visiting Antactica, seeing nothing but white ice and gray rocks for days on end… but then, how would you react when you saw this?Yegads! That is a part of Taylor Glacier, specifically the Blood Falls, located in the dry valleys of Antarctica. Apparently, a lake was
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This is totally cool: an animated simulator that lets you make model solar systems! It's put together by the PhET Interactive Simulations group at — hey! — the University of Colorado at Boulder. All you have to do is put in the masses, locations, and initial velocities of the objects (up to four) and then hit
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The Symphony of Science is a wonderful project taking words from famous scientists and using an autotuner to create music. It's pretty popular; the first one has over 3 million views on YouTube!The newest version has statements by a dozen different scientists, all talking about what science is and what it does. As Richard Dawkins
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My friend Glenn Schneider is an astronomer with a not-so-peculiar obsession for those of us in this trade: he's an umbraphile, a shadow lover, an eclipse chaser. He's seen 27 solar eclipses… at last count. I know if that's wrong he'll be quick to correct me. One thing he's been doing for the past few eclipses
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My niece, Lindsey, is weird. Shocker, I know, given her DNA. But there you go. And to prove my point, here's what she's doing: she's growing a mustache, kinda, for charity. She works for a group called 826, which promotes reading and writing for local kids. Lindsey's in Boston, and for the month of February she's
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Skeptic and journalist Simon Singh appeared before the High Court today in a hearing about accusations of libel. This case is critical for journalism, medicine, science, and skepticism, and you can get the background info on it in an earlier post I wrote. But basically, Simon was sued by the British Chiropractic Association over an
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The Space Shuttle mission STS-130 ended last night with the Orbiter Endeavour safely landing in Florida at 10:20 p. m. Eastern time yesterday. I live-tweeted the event, and so I was too busy to pay much attention to the Twitter feed from Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut onboard the the International Space Station. I wish I had,
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Years ago, I visited the Grand Canyon with my family. The beauty of it was overwhelming, and everything they say about it is true. It's magnificent. That grandeur is only amplified by the obvious scientific significance of it. The layers of sedimentary rock, exposed by the eons-long patient erosion of the Colorado river, are a
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If you've ever wondered what it would be like to hang out near the Cassini Saturn spacecraft and get the same view it does, the put on your red/green glasses and check out this anaglyph of the moon Prometheus:Mmmm, threedeealicious. Click to enjovianate. Prometheus is a bit weird. OK, it's a lot weird. It's an irregularly-shaped
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... met Baba Brinkman at TAM London, and wasn't sure what to make of him. He's a big guy, noticeably white, and raps. About evolution. OK then. Well, being a skeptic I had to wait for the evidence. So when he performed on stage I was attentive, and my scientific curiosity was quickly satisfied: he's the
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UPDATE: Kevin Trudeau has been cited with contempt of court and must serve time in jail for it. I love how that article describes Trudeau as "deeply tanned". That's awesome. For those unaware, Trudeau is not one of the good guys. In fact, to describe him in the terms I want, I'd have to violate my own
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Perched on top of an Atlas V rocket, on February 11 the Solar Dynamics Observatory launched into space. About a minute after leaving the Earth, the rocket did two things: it passed the speed of sound, and screamed past a sundog, a rainbow-colored optical effect in the sky caused by ice crystals. And when it did,
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Tonight, the 530 km (320 mile) wide asteroid Vesta is at opposition. That means that it's opposite the Sun in the sky, so it rises when the Sun sets. That makes it easier to observe since you have literally all night to go out. But it also means it's at the point in its orbit when
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... just received a very odd press release: the Tulsa Air and Space Museum is partnering with something called the Rocket Racing League to create — get this — a rocket racing show. Like an air show, but with rocket-powered vehicles. They have a poster and everything:Now, as soon as I read this press release
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On the Carribean island of Montserrat is the Soufrière Hills volcano. This is the very same one that erupted in 1997 and did so much damage to the small island (and killed 19 people). On February 11, just a few days ago, the growing lave dome on the volcano partially collapsed, sending a plume 15,000 meters
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... final cosmic Valentine's Day wish from the wonderful Sixty Symbols site: a video valentine. Check out the other videos at the Sixty Symbols site, too. The woman introducing the video is my friend astronomer Amanda Bauer, aka Astropixie, and you should read her blog as well. She's pretty cool.
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Same shape, different moon… An interplanetary dedication of love for all you starry-eyed geeks:This is an image from Cassini. It's a closeup of a crater on Rhea, a moon of Saturn about half the size of our own natural satellite. I love how the small crater and ridge inside the bigger crater make it look
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