SOHO catches its first periodic comet.

Continue:Roger Sinnott

Strange signal may be echo of neutron star collision, black hole evaporation.

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An evaporating black hole is one suspect for what caused a fleeting but extremely powerful burst of radio waves from beyond the Milky Way

Continue:New Scientist Space - Astronomy

The big day arrived, and nothing could keep that spacecraft on the ground. At 7:34 am EDT NASA's Dawn spacecraft was lofted into space atop a Boeing Delta 2 rocket, beginning a 3 billion km (1.7 billion mile) journey to meet with two different large asteroids. If all goes well, the spacecraft will make its first encounter with Vesta in October, 2011, and then Ceres in February, 2015.
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Continue:Fraser Cain

whitelight7 posted a photo:

multiple exposure lunar eclipse

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Despite the accident, the mission still shows that space tethers can provide a cheap, safe way of returning payloads to Earth, say scientists

Continue:New Scientist Space - Space

Today's space photo was captured RickJ. He says it's a photograph of a pelican, but I think he's talking about the nebular variety.

The Carnival of Space continues. Wandering Space has the 22nd iteration of this wonderful collection of links.

Well now, this is just cool. ESA has instructions so you can make your own Hipparcos star globe. It looks like a 20-sided die (come on, can I get some D&D love here?) which you print out on your printer and then cut and glue together. It has all the constellations and the Milky Way on it. Lucky I just bought a colour laser printer.

Here's a cool picture of Canada's northernmost lake at Livescience, and a description of the changes happening from global warming.

The 50th anniversary of Sputnik's launch is coming up. What are you doing to celebrate? The Rocketry Blog has 10 good ideas.

How much will it cost to go back to the Moon? Not a trillion dollars, that's for sure. Space Politics deals with misinformation about the costs of space exploration.

Most scientists think water on Earth came from cometary bombardment. But there's another theory that elemental hydrogen in the atmosphere combined with oxygen in rocks to create the oceans. Quasar9 has the story.

Do you have a space-related blog? Email me your URL, and I'll start watching you. Write something interesting, and I'll link to it.

Continue:Fraser Cain

The WAC meeting in Alaska utilized three portable planetarium domes.

Continue:Roger Sinnott

ESA’s Hipparcos satellite mapped our galaxy and discovered millions of stars. With the information that the satellite collected, you can now make your own globe of the Milky Way, and even your own Hipparcos booklet. Read on to see how…

Continue:Fraser Cain

NASA’s Dawn probe launched toward asteroids Vesta and Ceres on Thursday.

Continue:Roger Sinnott

Launch countdown coverage for NASA’s Dawn mission to asteroids Vesta and Ceres.

Continue:Roger Sinnott

Proponents of the MOND theory say dark matter is not needed to explain gravitational anomalies

Continue:New Scientist Space - Space

The mission will use an advanced ion engine to reach two titans of the asteroid belt - Vesta and Ceres

Continue:New Scientist Space - Space

The mission will use an advanced ion engine to reach two titans of the asteroid belt - Vesta and Ceres

Continue:New Scientist Space - Space Technology

Launch countdown coverage for NASA’s Dawn mission to asteroids Vesta and Ceres.

Continue:David Tytell

Holloman Air Force Base has been involved with space for decades.

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Continue:Kristina Grifantini

Launch countdown coverage for NASA’s Dawn mission to asteroids Vesta and Ceres.

Continue:David Tytell

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft began its 1.7 billion mile journey through the inner solar system to study a pair of asteroids today at 7:34 AM. EDT.

The Delta 2 rocket, fitted with…

Continue:Fraser Cain

Relays for the six “pips” at Sydney Observatory c.1982, picture Nick Lomb
A few days ago we discussed how time was measured and disseminated in Australia.
As I was preparing my talk on Harbour Time - the history of timekeeping in Sydney Harbour - on Saturday (29 September 2007) at 1 pm at the National Maritime Museum […]

Continue:Nick Lomb

ESA's Hipparcos mission provided astrometric data on thousands of stars. Thanks to advances in computational processing power it has been possible to revisit the original data and improve the accuracy of the derived catalogue.

Continue:Fraser Cain

To help you learn about the southern night sky, Sydney Observatory provides a night sky star map or chart for each month of the year (see the link below). We also provide an audio guide of the month’s night sky, presented by one of Sydney Observatory astronomy experts (this link also below). You can listen […]

Continue:irma

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft began its 1.7 billion mile journey through the inner solar system to study a pair of asteroids Thursday at 7:34 a.m. EDT.

Continue:Roger Sinnott

tt152 posted a photo:

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osamabinamer posted a photo:

Look it carefully

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The ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory has provided new insight into puzzling celestial objects known as magnetars.

Continue:MCCAG

NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity has reached its first science site in Victoria Crater.

Continue:David Tytell

You can't keep a good mission down. I guess you can. Actually, it seems like most good missions are kept down (Terrestrial Planet Finder, anyone?). But once, it looks like the good guys are going to win. A cool mission to search for black holes has been resurrected, and will fly in space after all. Wise move NASA, send a spacecraft to help solve one of the most puzzling mysteries in modern astronomy.
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Continue:Fraser Cain

You know the cliche, wherever we find water here on Earth, we find life. But what if the environment is really hostile? So hostile that any living creature would almost never see water. And even when there was water, they were constantly being blasted with radiation. Amazingly, there's a microbe out there, Deinococcus geothermalis, that can handle some of the harshest environments on the planet - favoured habitats include nuclear power plants. Scientists once suspected that microbes like this might have evolved on Mars. Nope, they're homegrown.
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Continue:Fraser Cain

A charity hopes that the US House of Representatives provision to ban funding human expeditions to Mars can be overturned

Continue:New Scientist Space - Human Spaceflight