Astro-Challenge: See Saturn’s Moons in 1 to 7 Order.

 
    This week’s challenge may also give you a unique photographic opportunity. On the evening of July 31st (my birthday!) Saturn’s moons will be in 1 to 7 order. This will occur from 6:45 to 11:15 Universal Time, and favor viewers in Australia and the Far East. Later in the evening over North America, only speedy [...]

Astro-Event: A Planetary-Galactic Pairing.

An interesting pairing of Saturn & NGC 4073. (Created by the Author in Starry Night).

 
   This week’s astro-challenge may test your skills as a “visual athlete;” a close visual conjunction of the planet Saturn and the galaxy NGC 4073.  This unique event comes to us via the computations of reader Ed Kotapish. On the evening [...]

Review: Voyager by Stephen J. Pyne.

 
   Ours may be an age of discovery like no other. This week, we look at Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery, by Stephen J. Pyne, out July 26th, 2010 from Viking Press. This fascinating work delves into the Voyager series of spacecraft missions from a unique perspective, juxtaposing it as a [...]

08.06.10: Titan and the Case of the Missing Acetylene.

  
   It started with two papers… as of late, much good and bad science journalism has been committed to the mysteries of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.  A photochemical smog shrouded world, Titan is a dynamic place, and would easily qualify as a planet in its own right if it were in a solo orbit about [...]

26.04.10-Amateurs Scour the Solar System.

A stunning Martian panorama! (Credit:NASA/JPL Image Processing by Michael Howard & Glen Nagle).
   A quiet sort of revolution has been brewing online. Amateur astronomers have taken to the web on cloudy, light polluted nights and turned newly found computing power normally reserved for gaming and Second Life into something truly productive and phenomenal; the reprocessing [...]

22.04.10-The Exotic World of Prometheus.

 The tiny shepherd world of Prometheus.
    The moons of Saturn continue to astound. The count now stands at 61, and one by one, NASA’s Cassini orbiter is giving us a close up look at these unique worlds, some for the first time. Last year, Cassini passed within 36,000 miles of Prometheus just the day after [...]

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