No, not that kind.
The rest of the astronomical world is raving about Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1), but I’ve had to live vicariously through others for this one. A string of cloudy evenings has foiled my observing plans for the last several days, and just as the comet was reaching its visual peak for we Northern […]

(6 March 2002) — Astronaut John M. Grunsfeld, payload commander, waves at a crewmate inside Space Shuttle Columbia’s crew cabin during a brief break in work on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in the cargo bay of the shuttle during the STS-109 mission’s third space walk.
Courtesy of the New York Times I just learned that […]

When Google Earth initially debuted I viewed it as a nifty toy of sorts, in a “Cool, I can see my house from here!” sort of way. Like many, I’d played around with the program in its infancy and had some fun peeking at famous sites from a bird’s eye view, but got bored with […]

The folks at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory recently held a contest on their web site, allowing viewers to vote for their favorite Chandra imagery spanning the telescope’s observations to date. (Even though the voting has officially ended, you can still make your picks if you’re so inclined.) Of the 48 nominees, here’s the final […]

Bloody Vikings!
I’d come across a news item yesterday which irritated me — well, it’s not really new anyway, but I’ll explain.
In 1976, NASA’s Viking Project - an ambitious undertaking destined for Mars - made history when the Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers safely touched down on the Martian surface. They were the first spacecraft […]

After logging a 487-million-kilometer journey to the red planet, Spirit, the first of NASA’s two Mars Exploration Rovers, touched down safely in Mars’ Gusev Crater back on January 3rd, 2004. The rover was originally scheduled to complete a three-month mission surveying interesting scientific targets, and the initial plans estimated that Spirit would only traverse a […]