 | Mr WordPress on Hello world! |
| Rick on A New DAWN for Asteroid E… |
| Bob Johnson on The Notorious Mars Email |
| Bob Johnson on A New DAWN for Asteroid E… |
| Rick on 55 Cancri: Enter the Habitable… |
NASA’s premier asteroid explorer, DAWN, or has successfuly launched as of 9/27/2007.
DAWN’s mission is simple: to examine asteroids Vesta and Ceres. DAWN will able to tell us what the element and mineral composition, shape, topography, and tectonic history. It will also measure gravity fields and mass of the objects. It also has methods for the [...]
Filed under: asteroid, ceres, dawn, vesta | 2 Comments »
“Mars is coming! Mars is coming!”
That’s a familiar subject for email that clogs Exchange servers about every two years about how Mars will be as large as a full moon. This, of course, is totally false. The picture above is often pictured in the email. Stop the email people! We all fell for it once [...]
Filed under: gemini, mars, taurus | 1 Comment »
This is an artist’s depiction of an extremely rare magnetar, a neutron star spinning at incredible speeds and emitting incredible amounts of x-rays. The star is so dense, the entire mass of sun is fit into an object with a mere 9 mile radius. A spoonful of material from this magnetar would literally weigh many [...]
Filed under: magnetar, neutron star, sagittarius | Leave a Comment »
I have making super small posts, but I found this great site, BlogInSpace.com.
If you are a fellow blogger, I strongly encourage you try this out. Humans transmit many programs into space with the hopes someday that intelligent life will pick it up and respond. Much in the same way SETI and SETI@home users monitor radio [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
The universe is an ever changing place; or least it is to astronomers. Most of us when we were in school remember that there were only nine planets in the entire universe. Now there are eight planets in our solar system, several named Pluto-sized objects near the Kuiper Belt, and more than 200 discovered planets [...]
Filed under: exoplanet, transit method, wobble method | Leave a Comment »
Tonight the reddish orange color of the Harvest Moon will be upon us yet again. The full moon nearest the autumnal equinox makes the moon’s light last well into the night, allowing farmers some much needed light to harvest there fall crops.
The atmosphere reduces visible light on celestial objects near the horizon, which is why [...]
Filed under: harvest moon, moon | Leave a Comment »
β Geminorum (more commonly called Pollux) is the head of the twin Pollux in the Gemini constellation. Pollux has a secret he has been hiding for millions of years though.
Pollux is the only star readily visible in the sky that has a confirmed companion (i.e. exoplanet). For thousands of years this has been a significant [...]
Filed under: castor, exoplanet, gemini, pollux | Leave a Comment »
Stellarium is a free, open-source planetarium software. Did I mention it was free?
Stellarium definitely gives the new version of Google Earth a run for its money. The interface is very simple. It can even be run through a projector to create your own real life planetarium.
It runs smoothly on older computers (I have running on [...]
Filed under: free software, planetarium, stellarium | Leave a Comment »
Nearly 40 light years away, a cosmic stone throw, there exists an interesting star system. 55 Cancri is a star system much like our own: it has planets in the “habitable” zone.
The binary star is less luminous as our own and evolutionary models place it at approximates 5,500 million years old. It has a magnitude [...]
Filed under: 55 Cancri, astrobiology, binary star, cancer, exoplanet | 2 Comments »
This morning I woke up early with my daughter and decided that I was going to try to take advantage of my digital camera’s high zoom and a tripod I found laying around. The following are my very first ever photos of Venus taken. While certainly not “groundbreaking”, I at least got close enough to [...]
Filed under: astrophotography, photos | 2 Comments »
