I’ve got to be close to the last person on the Internet to link to this, but in the unlikely event that you haven’t already seen it, Phil Plait presents the best astronomy pictures of 2006. My personal favorite of his images is probably this one: We haven’t sent all that many probes to Mars,… Continue reading 2006 in Astronomy Pictures
Category: Astronomy
Other Earths
Speaking of James Nicoll and space news, he also notes the launch of the COROT satellite, which is designed to look for extrasolar planets. The detection limit for COROT is supposed to be something like twice the mass of the Earth, so there’s some reasonable expectation that it should shed light on planetary systems more… Continue reading Other Earths
Press Release Bursts
One of the fun things about following science news through the Eurekalert press release aggregator is that work done by big collaborations tends to show up multiple times, in slightly different forms. Take, for example, the gamma-ray-burst results being released in Nature this week, which show up no less than five times: one, two, three,… Continue reading Press Release Bursts
The Band Is On the Field!
One of the requirements of the Nobel Prize is that the laureates give a public lecture at some point, and as a result, there is generally a seminar scheduled a little bit before the actual prize ceremony, at which the laureats give lectures about the work for which they’re being honored. These frequently involve props… Continue reading The Band Is On the Field!
Displacing Artie Shaw
A flurry of press releases hit EurekAlert yesterday (one, two, three), indicating the release of a bunch of data from NASA’s Stardust mission. This is the probe that was sent out to fly through the tail of a comet, and catch tiny dust particles in an aerogel matrix, and return them to Earth for analysis.… Continue reading Displacing Artie Shaw
Classic Edition: Space Trilogy, Volume 4
Here’s the day’s final repost of an old blog post about space policy. This is yet another post from 2004, with the usual caveats about linkrot and dated numbers and the like. This one is more or less a direct response to comments made in response to the previous post attempting to argue that using… Continue reading Classic Edition: Space Trilogy, Volume 4
Classic Edition: The Moon is a Harsh Wossname
Yet another in today’s series of reposts of articles about space policy. This is another old blog post from 2004, back when the Moon-and-Mars plan was first announced. As with the previous posts, any numbers or links in the post may be badly out of date, and there are some good comments at the original… Continue reading Classic Edition: The Moon is a Harsh Wossname
Classic Edition: The Arrogance of Complexity
This is the second in a series of old posts about space exploration in general, and the Bush Moon-and-Mars plan specifically. This is a repost of an old blog post from 2004, so any numbers or links in the post may be out of date. There were also a few comments to the original article,… Continue reading Classic Edition: The Arrogance of Complexity
Classic Edition: Man vs. Machine in Space
As threatened in passing yesterday, I dug up some old posts on space policy, and will re-post them here. This first one dates from January of 2004, around the time that Bush first floated the idea of the new Moon-and-Mars plan that’s re-shaping NASA. The original post has a ton of links in it, and… Continue reading Classic Edition: Man vs. Machine in Space
Call for Nominations: Astronomy Results of the Year
It’s more or less traditional for magazines and tv shows to do some sort of year-end wrap-up. As this blog is now hosted by a magazine, I suppose I ought to follow suit. Of course, compiling “Year’s Best” lists is a highly subjective business, requiring a lot of information gathering, so I’ll throw this open… Continue reading Call for Nominations: Astronomy Results of the Year