Ah here I am in ever-so sunny Aix in the south of France. I’m blogging from my iPhone right now because I’m by the pool and too comfy to go and find my laptop. I’m also testing out the Wordpress app from the App Store.

The skies here are big and…

I’d like to hear your thoughts on the things you like and dislike about Orbiting Frog and any changes or modifications you’d like to see. This could include anything from the way the blog looks and feels to the topics covered or the regularity of updates.

Tonight: Mercury is 30° to the lower left of the star Aldebaran. Look for Mercury in the morning sky an hour before sunrise. Mercury will be very low in the ENE. The quick moving planet is 15° from the Sun and moving about a degree closer to it each day.…

The powers that be have decreed that some ereas of physic are more equal than others. The BBC has a good summary.

You may have noticed that I have ‘fallen off the internet’ this week, as a friend of mine recently said in a text message. Well the reason is that I have been attending a meeting about star formation and the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Astronaut Ron Garan works on assigned tasks during the last scheduled spacewalk of the STS-124 mission specialist. A great photo of one of Colbert’s heroes at work.

Tonight, July 5, look west and you’ll see a temporary “Belt of Three Stars”. Saturn, Mars and the star Regulus are sitting by Leo in a chance alignment that literally will only happen tonight. Very cool.

Mang is hosting his first Carnival of Space this week. I’d like to highlight a couple of articles from the list here, too.

I am running a conference in September and I’m inviting astronomers and astronomy bloggers from anywhere! If you’re interested in how astronomy and the internet can combine to produce new and interesting tools for research and communication then this conference is for you.

Spectrometers are used, like prisms, to spread light out into the component colours. This enables us to understand the compositions of everything from stars to streetlights. Here I show you how to make your own spectrometer and give you a few examples of what you can see with it.

A nifty graphic showing the sizes of the planets, moons, comets, asteroids and plutoids in relative font sizes. Best viewed very large!

Black holes are very interesting things, aren’t they? There’s something fascinating about those things which are so hard to understand. Black holes are one of the most asked about objects at almost any public space talk. Certainly school children seem to be obsessed with them! This week I had more than one person ask about them via email.