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Space and astronomy news
  1. Hauntingly Beautiful Aurora Video
    Time-lapse photographer Christian Mülhauser braved sub-zero temperatures and frozen camera equipment to capture this stunning aurora footage from Norway during the last week of January 2012. Powerful solar storms in January made for some impressive auroral displays… thanks to Christian for capturing them on camera! (...)Read the rest of Hauntingly Beautiful Aurora Video (143 words) [...]
  2. 600 Million Year Drought Makes Life on Surface of Mars Unlikely
    Mars is often referred to as a desert world, and for good reason – its surface is barren, dry and cold. While water was abundant in the distant past, it has long since disappeared from the surface, although ice, snow, frost and fog are still common. Other than liquid brines possibly trickling at times, all [...]
  3. Asteroid Vesta Floats in Space in High Resolution 3-D
    The giant Asteroid Vesta literally floats in space in a new high resolution 3-D image of the battered bodies Eastern Hemisphere taken by NASA’s Dawn Asteroid Orbiter. Haul out your red-cyan 3-D anaglyph glasses and lets go whirling around Vesta and sledding down mountains to greet the alien Snowman! The sights are fabulous ! The [...]
  4. Super Bowl Cities Seen From Space
    If you live in or are from the US, you probably know that today is Super Bowl Sunday. Whatever you happen to be doing, be it tailgating in Indianapolis, getting together with friends and family (and plenty of hot wings and nachos) in your living room or just waiting for all the fuss to be [...]
  5. The Milky Way’s Magnetic Personality
    Recently we took a look at a very unusual type of map – the Faraday Sky. Now an international team of scientists, including those at the Naval Research Laboratory, have pooled their information and created one of the most high precision maps to date of the Milky Way’s magnetic fields. Like all galaxies, ours has [...]
  6. Journal Club – Neutrino Vision
    According to Wikipedia, a journal club is a group of individuals who meet regularly to critically evaluate recent articles in the scientific literature. And of course, the first rule of Journal Club is… don’t talk about Journal Club. So, without further ado – today’s journal article is about the latest findings in neutrino astronomy. Today’s [...]
  7. Recycling Pulsars – The Millisecond Matters…
    It’s a millisecond pulsar… a rapidly rotating neutron star and it’s about to reach the end of its mass gathering phase. For ages the vampire of this binary system has been sucking matter from a donor star. It has been busy, spinning at incredibly high rotational speeds of about 1 to 10 milliseconds and shooting [...]
  8. New Study Shows How Trace Elements Affect Stars’ Habitable Zones
    Habitable zones are the regions around stars, including our own Sun, where conditions are the most favourable for the development of life on any rocky planets that happen to orbit within them. Generally, they are regions where temperatures allow for liquid water to exist on the surface of these planets and are ideal for “life [...]
  9. Beautiful Conjunction: Comet Garradd Meets M92
    This lovely image of Comet Garradd (C/2009 PI) as it passes by the globular cluster M92 in the constellation Hercules, was taken remotely from the Tzek Maun Observatory in New Mexico by our friends Giovanni Sostero, Ernest Guido and Nick Howes. While the two objects look like they are right next to each other, M92 [...]
  10. Cities at Night Panorama of Millions of US East Coast Earthlings
    Do you live here? Tens of millions of Earthlings live and work in the bustling and seemingly intertwined American mega-metropolis of the Philadelphia-New York City-Boston corridor (bottom-center splotch) captured in this stunning “Cities at Night” panorama of the East Coast of the United States along the Atlantic seaboard (image above). Look northward and you’ll see [...]

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