Last night, about 1am, Jordan the rat and I walked over to a nearby park, in an attempt to see the Camelopardalid meteor shower. Jordan didn't actually walk. He is learning to be a shoulder rat, so he was riding on my shoulder tucked underneath a jacket & hood, sniffing like crazy to smell all the smells. And since rats have lousy vision I assume ( Read more... )

"The last total lunar eclipse until 2010 occurs Wednesday night, with cameo appearances by Saturn and the bright star Regulus on either side of the veiled full moon ( Read more... )

Oh my, this is amazing. To steal danjite's description:

Comet Encke had just dipped inside the orbit of Mercury, perilously close to the sun, when a solar eruption struck and literally tore the comet's tail off.

Here is an actual video of it.

For a full description of the process, with times, here's a good articleThe basics (culled from the above article ( Read more... )

This first one is downright neighborly compared to the second one-

Largest extrasolar planet has density of corkAstronomers say they have found the largest and least dense planet yet -a gas giant twice the size of Jupiter- orbiting the star GSC02620-00648 in the constellation Hercules, 1,435 light-years away. Called TrES-4, the celestial whopper ( Read more... )

In the far, far, far, far, far distant future, several billion years from now, the Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy might collide and fuse into a combined galaxy.

Neato.

Another interesting tidbit, shows that HD 149026 b, a small planet orbiting a distant star, "has an atmospheric temperature of 2,300 kelvins (about 3,700 degrees ( Read more... )