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A little before noon on September 1st, 1859, England's foremost solar astronomer Richard Carrington was at work in his observatory, drawing the sunspots his telescope projected onto the screen ( Read more... )

On top of my previous posts about stars going bang ("Where's the kaboom? There should have been a glorious earth-shattering kaboom!") I give you a nice example of an actual supernova ( Read more... )

Another spectacular sky-boom has gone off recently - this time the star EV Lacertae, a red dwarf off in the direction of the Lizard. It's only 16 light-years away, but red dwarfs are such featherweights that even that close it's invisible to the naked eye ( Read more... )

In response to the Exploding Ant post - yes, I'm gradually working my way back, hopefully I won't have too many other reposts -

Globitermes sulphureus, the exploding termite ( Read more... )

And while we're on the subject of explosions:


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The Tunguska Event, Sometimes called the Tunguska Explosion, occurred near the Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, in Russia, at 7:40 AM on June 30, 1908.


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