Five years ago, Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars. While they're getting pretty broken down and rickety, they're still functioning despite their expected lifetime of a few months. This is an amazing testament to these vehicles roaming around another planet and to the people here on earth controlling and maintaining them.

I watched a TV special ( Read more... )

Best of luck to the NASA and JPL teams on the Mars Phoenix lander, due to enter the Mars atmosphere and land tomorrow evening. They need a success. But I'm crossing my fingers, because landing on Mars is hard.


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The last lunar eclipse of the decade is Wednesday night, with totality occurring around 9:30pm Central Time. It's supposed to be partly cloudy here; perhaps I'll get a good look at it. It's going to be so cold, as long as there is not a lot of cloud cover it should be a crisp night with good seeing.

It's a beautifully clear and cold night tonight, and the moon is beginning its eastern trek again as a waxing crescent. This and the next couple of nights are probably the last opportunities to view Comet 17P/Holmes.

I saw it tonight while walking the dog. It has traveled noticeably across the sky, now appearing very close to Mirfak (Alpha Persei, ( Read more... )

All the rage in lay astronomy for the past week has been Comet Holmes. This tiny short-period comet has been known for over a century but is usually extraordinarily dim (around mag 14-18), a challenging object to find even with a telescope. Last Wednesday, however, it dramatically brightened, shooting from mag 17 to mag 2 in a matter of hours. ( Read more... )

It's been hard to notice because of the unseasonably warm weather, but fall is definitely here. I was outside for a bit late last night and saw the Pleiades high in the eastern sky, with red Aldebaran and the constellation Taurus just below. I could visualize Orion, that most recognizable of all winter constellations, but if it had risen at all was ( Read more... )

I stopped for a few moments to look at the sky while taking Ajay on a short "physical therapy" walk tonight. It's the Perseid meteor shower and while I was too tired and distracted to stay long, I did see two meteor streaks in a couple of minutes. It was a little early for peak viewing, and there was some haze and a lot of light pollution, so that ( Read more... )

Today is the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year. It happens in just a few minutes, here.

Sun ( Read more... )

An example of things I think about while walking to work:

The earth is about 1.5e-5 light years from the Sun; there are plenty of stars massive enough to end their lives in a supernova within 100 light years of the solar system. 100 light years is about 6.5 million times further from the earth than the Sun. Luminosity follows an inverse square law ( Read more... )

Today was the first day of spring (printemps).

On the Beckman quad on our campus is a very large sculpture. It consists of a tall spire and three short fountains. The geometry is such that at solar transit (local noon) at the solstices and the equinoxes, the tip of the shadow cast by the spire just brushes the tip of one of the fountains. So, today ( Read more... )