Gorgeous.

Tags: Enceladus, Saturn, moon, space, probe, ice, life, solar+system

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One more thing I hadn’t thought I needed to be worried about.
(with a tip of the hat to our cousins at Bad Astronomy Blog)
Tags: hadron, abuse, subatomic, particle, CERN

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So here I am. Missing Peter (inevitable), enjoying the weather (hot, sunny, a touch humid), and working (also inevitable: Vasa is going to have to wait for the next trip, I’m afraid).
The eclipse passed without notice in most parts of the city, I think. (But at only — what, 30%-ish totality? — this is forgivable. […]

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PASADENA, Calif.–Bars abound in spiral galaxies today, but this was not always the case. A group of 16 astronomers, led by Kartik Sheth of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, has found that bars tripled in number over the past seven billion years…

So what’s the cause? Gentrification, or looser liquor licensing […]

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Sheesh. Unusual for me. But here’s the info.  (The path of totality has also been Google Mapped.)
Stockholm will only be getting a partial — I estimate 35–40%-ish coverage from the diagram — but that’s still more than I’d have seen at home in Ireland. What great timing!
Here’s a magic phrase, though:

The path of totality […]

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“At the dead of night, two noble planets, Tarva and Alambil, will pass within one degree of each other. Such a conjunction has not occurred for two hundred years.” (Dr. Cornelius in Prince Caspian)
Irish weather strikes again.
We had a tight conjunction of Mercury, Mars and Jupiter this morning. When I went to bed the […]

Posted in Astronomy, Home life, Ireland, Uncategorized 1 Comment »

From an article about the deploying of the International Space Station’s new solar panels: one astronaut is mentioned…
…Christopher J. Ferguson, another Navy captain, who is on his first shuttle mission and is a member of the all-astronaut rock band Max Q.
The all-astronaut rock band??!!
Where do they play? Where can a geek(ette) buy their CDs? Someone […]

Posted in Astronomy, Current events, Travel 1 Comment »

Or the second planette. (Or dwarf planet, or planetoid, or whatever-the-F we’re calling the Small Guys Out Past Neptune this week.)
Anyway: the planet formerly known as Xena is now Eris. …Which makes so much sense, given recent events. And her moon is Dysnomia. (Which I would otherwise have pegged as the word for […]

Posted in Astronomy, Current events 3 Comments »

Technorati Tags: Pluto, planet

Posted in Astronomy, Science 1 Comment »

– was my response when I woke up this morning to hear our old buddy David Moore from Astronomy Ireland on RTÉ’s morning news show, talking about a story that the tapes of the Apollo 11 moon landing had been mislaid.
Needless to say, the story’s all over Google News at the moment, in many permutations […]

Posted in Astronomy, Current events, Media 1 Comment »

The Independent has turned Comet Swift-Tuttle into Comet Swift-Turtle. Twice.
(Not only a typo, but an oxymoron…! Nice going, guys and gals.)
Oh well. Hope it clears up a little so that we can see the Perseids…
Technorati Tags: astronomy, science, Perseid, meteor shower

Posted in Astronomy, Current events, Home life, Ireland, Note to self 1 Comment »

New from Saturn orbit, courtesy of Cassini. (And Sky & Telescope.) Technorati Tags: Cassini, Saturn, Titan, Epimetheus

Posted in Astronomy, Current events, Graphic and plastic arts, Travel No Comments »