Astronomy news, commentary, and opinions

The Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope has been renamed in honor of Enrico Fermi.  Paul Hertz, chief scientist for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters: “Enrico Fermi was the first person to suggest how cosmic particles could be accelerated to high speeds, his theory provides the foundation of understanding the new phenomena his namesake [...]

Here’s one of the latest Cassini image releases.  This is the north pole of the little moon of Janus.  I would imagine north is so called, because of the right-hand-rule.The Right Hand Rule:  take your right hand and point the thumb up.  Curl your fingers around like they are around a ball.  The thumb points [...]

The above image is what they call a micrometeorite, I snapped a pic of it at 400x with the Celestron LCD Digital Microscope. Tons of these things fall from space daily, some in your backyard, you have probably been hit by one, they are very cool, again you are looking at something from space that is a remnant from the building blocks of our solar system, some 4.5 billion years ago.

Here’s the latest Spitzer image (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/L. Allen & X. Koenig (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA))  Clicking it will bring up a larger version with credits.  Other sizes can be found at the Spitzer site, linked below.A Spitzer Space Telescope press release:Generations of stars can be seen in this new infrared portrait from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. In [...]

After about three years the Mars Express Webcam is back in business.  More formally known at the Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera or VMC.  The webcam was onboard the Mars Express to watch and confirm the Beagle Lander separation.Keep in mind this is not a scientific camera, but does indeed provide really good images.  Let [...]

In celebration of Cern's Large Hadron Collider, (LHC), going live September 10, 2008 Black holes is going micro, that's right microscopic. I've always been fascinated with the microscopic world and so every once in a while I am going to post some micro images with the help of the Celestron LCD digital microscope.

Here’s the latest image and news from Hubble.  The image is primarily of NGC 1275, an active galaxy which essentially means the galaxy has a black hole at the center with plenty of available material to “feed” on.  Lots of these active galaxies have active jets blowing outwards.  This galaxy has rather extraordinary magnetic filaments [...]

With all the clouds we have had for the last three months it was nice to see a brief break the other night.  I grabbed the binoculars and out I went, whatever you do don’t neglect the night sky because you lack a telescope.  I had no problem seeing three of the four Galilean moons; [...]

I'm going to broaden my content here just a bit, and I hope it doesn't prove too distracting to the main theme of the site. I'm a bit of a weather geek. I love watching and photographing clouds, storms, lightning, and other atmospheric happenings. I figure the link between my interest in those things and astronomy probably isn't too tenuous. I don't intend to overwhelm the site with weather related imagery, but I'm going to leave an opening for it. And since I'm making that opening, I'm going to drop something in there today. Flagstaff has been soaking up a lot of wet weather over the last wee

Something different again for Black holes, thought I would enter one of my shots in Creative Photography's weekly photo contest.