Mars in High Definition

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has beening imaging the surface of Mars with its High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera since 2006, taking some spectacular images during this time. To look at the newest batch of released images, go here. Enjoy!

Solar Eclipse on Monday, 2009 January 26

Unfortunately, it is not a total eclipse, and is only visible from Indonesia, Australia, South-East Asia, and part of Southern India and South Africa, but the Moon will cover "just" 93% of the Sun, producing a rare sight - for those lucky enough to see it called an annular "ring of fire." Go to spaceweather.com for more information, and hope you get a chance to see it!

New video of meteor falling to Earth

The University of Western Ontario Meteor Group has a network of cameras which scan the sky looking for previously unknown meteorites falling onto Earth. On October 15th they saw one, and you watch the pretty incredible videos here. Enjoy!

Mars Webcam

Onboard of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Mars Express spacecraft is an instrument called the Visual Monitoring Camera - a small optical telescope initially used to monitor the separate of the Beagle lander from Mars Express when Mars Express first reached Mars. This instrument has now been turned on again as a "webcam" of the Mars surface, which you can watch from here. Enjoy!

Perseid Meteor Shower

The Perseid meteor shower peaked last night / early this morning, and spaceweather.com has lots of amazing pictures of this event here. If you have your own pictures, please email me the URL or leave it below - I'd love to see them. And if you missed the meteor shower, don't worry you can still see some meteors for about another week and it should be back next year.

Hubble Space Telescope Competition

In honor of the Hubble Space Telescope completing its 100,000th orbit around the earth, hubblesite.org is sponsoring a raffle for a framing-worthy photography of this image of a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud taken by Hubble during this orbit. Good luck!

Solar Eclipse pictures

Last Friday, a Solar Eclipse was visible from northern Europe to China, and pictures of this events are available here courtesy of spaceweather.com. Enjoy!

Mars Pictures

The Surface Stereo Imager on the Phoenix Mars Lander recently made some 3D images of the Martian surface, available here, while Mars Express recently took the most detailed pictures of Mars's moon Phobos to date, which you can see here. Enjoy!

New NASA image archive

NASA and Internet Archive project have developed a new online archive for all of the images NASA has taken over the years, from photographs of machinery on Earth to astronauts on Mars to the most distant galaxies. These are absolutely amazing, and encourage all of you to check it out.

Neat Movie of the Moon transitting the Earth

NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft, on its way to its rendezvous with Comet Hartley 2, recently filmed this video of the Moon "transiting" the Earth - essentially passing between the Earth and this spacecraft, absorbing some of the light being emitted by the Earth. This technique has proven invaluable in detecting and studying planets orbiting other stars, and in fact Deep Impact is currently looking for an Earth-size transiting planet around red dwarf GJ436, as part of the EPOCh project. Enjoy!

Very Large Array

Last month I was at the Eleventh Synthesis Imaging Workshop run by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) on how to reduce data from a radio interferometer. The summer school was located in Socorro, NM which is located near the Very Large Array (VLA),the world's premier radio astronomer. As part of the summer school, we got a guided tour of the VLA - which was pretty awesome - and here are the pictures:

Very Large Array

Hope you enjoy them, and get a chance to visit the VLA yourself.

Solstice Moon Illusion

Tonight is the solstice full moon, meaning that the Moon will be very low on the horizon and will appear to be huge. As explained in this Science@NASA article, this is an optical illusion based on how our brain processes data - but makes for wonderful pictures regardless. Hope you get a chance to look at it.

World Wide Telescope

Possibly as answer to Google Sky, Microsoft has released it's own Astronomical image gallery, called "Worldwide Telescope", available here. It looks pretty cool. Enjoy!