Well today is day three (techincally) of my PhD. Monday was just an enrolment day and so yesterday was my first hands on day in the office. It is nice to be back. i’m not really wandering the same corridors as I did before and due to my two year…

From NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (seriously what a great website) we have an image taken from the Earth by an enthusiast in Normandy, France.

This incredible image shows the disc of the Sun with a sunspot visible in the top right part of the image. Shown on the left hand…

Welcome to Orbiting Frog.

I have always loved space and to look up at te night sky. I got my first telescope at around the age of twelve and ever since, I’ve been hooked. I now own a neat little Meade ETX-70 and am studying for my PhD in Astrophysics.

I’ve made…

The object that caused so much confusion in 2003 by being bigger than Pluto has now been named. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) which recently demoted Pluto from ‘planet’ to ‘dwarf planet’ after the discovery of the object (formerly known as 2003 UB313) has decided to call that object Eris,…

In my blog post on Meteorites I mentioned the Moon formation theory regarding what is known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis. This theory is widely becoming regarded as the best model science has for the Moon’s formation.

Regardless of the evidence for and against this model, here is how it works…

We set…

A good, straightforward question - I like it. They’re round because they’re huge!

Basically the spherical shape of planets and stars comes from the fact that they contain so much mass that they have reasonably sized gravitational fields. The mass in any object pulls other masses in toward it. Just as…

The other day there was a partial Lunar eclipse (shown in this photo from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website). A friend of mine, James, noted that the Moon was really big that night too as it rose with a chunk missing in the evening. The size is exaggerated in…

I wasn’t really looking forward to Thursday’s ‘Extraterrestrial Sample Analysis’ talk. The title is dull because of the words sample and analysis and the extraterrestrial I felt was sure to be a false hope.

I was very wrong. It turns out that a team at the OU analyses meteorites, comet samples…

This week I am in Milton Keynes takin part in PPARC’s Summer School. PPARC is my funding body for the PhD, it stands for Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council. They have put up around 100 of us in the Jurys Inn hotel in MK and we are attending lectures…

As well as our own Moon passing in front of the Sun and creating an eclipse on Earth, we also can see eclipses occurring on other worlds. Jupiter’s four galilean moons are regularly seen moving in front of the planet and casting a shadow onto the gas giant’s surface. You…