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.

 
 Mars Express scouts the proposed landing site(s) for Phobos-Grunt.
    The pictures are in: 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 [...]

An Ephemeris of the Martian Moons.

This is a quick posting of the best apparitions of the moon of Mars, Deimos and Phobos, as promised in the Mars opposition post. The tables run for a week after opposition, and are accurate to about 10 minutes or so. I hand crafted these in Starry Night after I found a lack of info [...]

12 Very Special Events for the Century.

“Bizarreness” is part of our business in astronomy. We always get the top billing with the “how big, how far, how bright” records, but one thing that is hard to quantify is just how unique certain events are. Here, I present you a quick list, a baker’s dozen of astronomical oddities that are worth [...]

Review: Blast! A Film by Paul Devlin.

Blast! Can be seen as a documentary that was 13.7 billion years in the making. Directed by Paul Devlin, Blast! follows the exploits of a group of astrophysicists as they break new ground with a unique balloon borne telescope. BLAST stands for Balloon-Borne, Large Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope. As reported earlier this week in our post [...]

Astronomy at the (Bottom?) of the World.

Some astronomers literally go to the ends of the Earth in search of data. That life-giving layer we know as the atmosphere can also be a plain ol’ nuisance when it comes to visual observing, and can make viewing in some wavelengths such as sub-millimeter, infra-red and X-ray next to impossible. Sure, viewing from space [...]

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