14.03.10-Record Lightning Storm Spotted by Cassini.

 
Saturn is turning out to be a very electrified place. Last year, NASA’s Cassini orbiter spied a massive storm that broke the solar system record; beginning in January 2009, this storm raged on for 7 ½ months, the longest recorded. This marks the ninth storm on Saturn thus recorded; these behemoths tend to be around 1,900 [...]

13.03.10: Galaxy Zoo vs. the WWT.

 
Students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville have successfully merged two outstanding resources into a single, powerful tool. Recently, Microsoft unveiled the WorldWide Telescope, (WWT) an online resource that allows users to browse images and data culled from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. When they looked at classifying the myriad of galaxies presented, they turned toward another awesome [...]

LIGO: A Quest for Gravity Waves.

LIGO, Livingston. (All Photos by Author).

  We had to go there… last month’s NASA Tweetup at the Johnson Spaceflight Center saw us undertake the great American road trip from Astroguyz HQ north of Tampa, Florida, to Houston on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico and back. Ever the opportunists, we scoured the route for [...]

12.03.10:Update: A Phobos Flyby/Martian Moons Ephemeris II.

Keep an Eye on this Space for Phobos Pics!
   The pictures are processing: ESA’s Mars Express has performed two close flybys of Phobos in the past weeks and performed sensitive gravimetric as well as photographic reconnaissance passes of the bizarre moon. Of course, the data reveals more questions than it solves. Is Phobos solid rock, or [...]

In Defense of the Farmer’s Almanac.

 
    Sometimes, astronomical information comes from the most unlikely of sources. I first started into a lifelong interest of astronomy as a kid, growing up in the backwoods of northern Maine. There, a pristine sky that would be the envy of any backyard astronomer awaited almost every night, right beyond my doorstep. But I soon [...]

Astro-Challenge: Spotting Two-Faced Iapetus.

 The wacky orbit of Iapetus. (Created in Starry Night & Paint).
As the majestic planet Saturn approaches opposition on March 21st, I’d like to turn your telescopic attention to one of the most bizarre moons in the solar system; Iapetus. It was way back when in the 17th century that Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini noted that he [...]

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