Mercury, Not Like the Moon

When the first several days worth of Mercury pictures from the Messenger probe were released from JPL, I had to admit to a little disappoint. Mercury seemed rather moonlike, even the part we hadn’t seen yet.
Turns out I was just impatient.  The January 30, 2008 status report tells a different story:
“MESSENGER has shown that Mercury [...]

Mercury: New Ground

In my last posting on the MESSENGER mission, I said that the probe would be photographing parts of Mercury we hadn’t seen before. Here is one of the first pictures from such areas from a January 15, 2008 press release:

Why hadn’t we been able to take pictures of this side of Mercury before? The [...]

New views of Mercury: Simulated and Real

This is some exciting astronomy news I didn’t expect to see on a government computing news site:
From Government Computer News 1/9/2008: Mercury: up close and personal:
The Mercury Flyby Visualization Tool will offer simulated views of what Messenger will see during its approach, flyby and departure from the closest planet to the sun. The [...]

Telescopes and Open Access — Who Knew?

As a person, I’m very interested in astronomy and space exploration. As a librarian, I’m interested in open access and for as much scientific research to be free to the public as possible. Imagine my surprise when Peter Suber, one of the nation’s experts on the topic of open access to scholarship and who normally [...]

Another lovely spiral

I’ve been classifying a lot of galaxies for the GalaxyZoo project. Sometimes there is a really nice galaxy like this one.

Hotel Mauna Kea (parody)

Hotel Mauna Kea (parody)

Here’s a HI-Larious video about the ups and downs of being a visiting astronomy at the observatories at Hawaii’s Mauna Kea.

A comet worth waiting for!

I’m sure that I’ve mentioned comet Holmes a few times in the past few days. (Just not here) Usually connected with a whine about our overcast skies here in Juneau Alaska.
Last night the clouds cleared up for about an hour or so. I had already gone to bed when I decided to get up [...]

Ballooning on Venus

Balloons to go where no human could live. Thanks to Space Spin for pointing out this new idea for Venus exploration:

Ballooning on Venus

via Space Spin by Max on Aug 28, 2007
” Scientists hope to learn more about climate changes here on Earth by studying Venus. A prototype balloon could eventually study the planet’s surface and [...]

Christmas Greetings from Titan

Looks like a space enthusiast uploaded a Cassini Titan update to YouTube:
This is perfectly legal as NASA TV footage, when produced by NASA itself is public domain. I think the videos of Titan are more stunning the photographs. And it’s nice to know there is at least one more ocean world in our system. Even [...]

NASA - Beware the Mars Hoax

If you receive an e-mail about the glory that will come this month as Mars appears as large as full moon, please send the well-meaning but misguided sender this NASA link:
NASA - Beware the Mars Hoax
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/07jul_marshoax.htm
This is just one of the places where this hoax is documented.
Remember, just because you get an e-mail about something [...]