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Makes you think about how petty so many of the arguments and fights that we all engage in so frequently on our world really are. All the religions, beliefs, politics, prejudices, misunderstandings, and conflicts are all really so minute when we realize we are dots on a mote of dust floating in a vast galaxy, which itself is just a dot in the

I know the buzz of the day is the Nobel committee handing out the peace prize to the Golden One in hopes to politically promote him as world savior (I guess everyone needs a religion).

Meanwhile, real progress is being made in the field of astronomy. This morning NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, launched back on ( Read more... )

That a look at this image. Is it not gorgeous? However it is special simply beyond the breathtaking photography, it also represents a first, something we haven't seen before...


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Back in February, COROT-7b, an exoplanet discovered around the star COROT-7, a G9V type star (translation for those not in the know: slightly cooler and smaller then our Sun) some 490 light years away, made waves as the smallest exoplanet discovered thus far.

What made this discovery even more interesting is the announcement today that COROT-7b is ( Read more... )

We have a couple of telescopes in our home. Usually they stored in the basement since my home isn't well suited for stargazing due to the large amount of light pollution the city puts out and rather obscured view. It is certainly not worth setting up the large telescope unless I plan to travel somewhere remote. Still the small telescope is, well ( Read more... )

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3-D.

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This is why astronomy (and science in general) is so compelling to me. We discovered all these galaxies billions of light years away simply because we were curious. To see the universe as it was over 13 billion years ago, simply because we wondered and asked. All of this was found because people wanted to ( Read more... )

There are very few events that are significant enough to represent the start of a new epoch in human history, but July 20, 1969, 40 years ago today, was one such event. I speak of the day when our species first set foot on the Moon. that faithful day when Apollo 11 with it's three astronauts, Neil Alden Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Edwin ( Read more... )

I hardly heard anything on the news about this, really mentioned as an afterthought to the shuttle Endeavour finally being able to launch today. Anyway, today the 16th of July is the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 11 mission. Hopefully everyone actually already knows what the Apollo 11 mission is but just in case, it was the NASA ( Read more... )

Surely by now for all of us astronomy enthusiasts, the knowledge and evidence about extra-solar (or outside our Solar System) worlds is well documented, with the ever growing list of world presently topping 350. Well now Italian scientists have announced the first extra-galactic world ever discovered. Whoa ( Read more... )