Darkness, darkness, be my pillow
Take my hand, and let me sleep
In the coolness of your shadow
In the silence of your deep
– Youngbloods

Image Credit: NASA, JPL, Space Science Institute
This rare color view of Saturn’s night side shows how the rings dimly illuminate the southern hemisphere, giving it a dull golden glow. Part of […]

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has posted a nifty new slideshow highlighting imagery returned by the Spitzer Space Telescope. This is my favorite of the batch; a composite view of M82 (a.k.a. The Cigar Galaxy) which combines observations from a trio of venerable orbital observatories: Hubble, Spitzer, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Image Credits: NASA, JPL-Caltech, STScI, […]

If you have clear skies this weekend, now’s a great time to get out and observe the largest member of our solar system. Jupiter reached opposition to the Sun on May 4th, and will be closest to the Earth tonight, May 6th.
On May 6th, the date of closest approach, Jupiter will be 410 million miles […]

Oh how I love open source stuff. Are you a Firefox user? If not, you should be so you can take advantage of handy tools like this.
In the process of hunting down nifty new extensions for the browser supreme, I discovered a dandy little add-on, perfect for we astronomically-minded types.
Meet Sun Cult — a delightfully […]

Feast your eyes upon this marvelous new shot of Saturn’s moon Mimas, released today by the Cassini imaging team. Mimas, as you may recall, bears some resemblance to the Death Star, of Star Wars fame.

Image Credit: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute (click to enlarge)
This amazing perspective view captures battered Mimas against the […]

Now this is truly a significant press release, one which I’ve been ogling periodically all day. In January of 2005, the Huygens probe, ferried to the Saturnian system by the Cassini spacecraft, successfully landed on the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Huygens’ stately arrival marked a huge scientific milestone, delivering invaluable imagery and data […]

Image Credit: NASA (GSFC)
Behold the most recent, truly sad cultural commentary…
Results have been published from the latest Roper/National Geographic survey, which tests geographic knowledge amongst young adults aged 18-24. You may (or may not) recall the findings of the 2002 survey which, among other similarly egregious tidbits, revealed that 30% of young Americans couldn’t locate […]