This image from Flickr shows the rising Sun as it glows through the clouds. It is quite reminiscent of nebula containing or reflecting powerful light from stellar nurseries and is a good reminder that sometimes these nebulae are not always as…

Wired are reporting on a feasability study from the NASA Institute for Advanced Studies on a giant liquid mirror telescope that could potentially be placed on the Moon. Roger Angel or the University of Arizona is the man in charge of this study and he is suggestying it may be possible to…

Here’s a great image of all the bodies in the Solar System in order of size. It only goes down to a diameter of 200 miles - otherwise it would get very silly indeed. Note that several planets fall after several moons in the rankings. also note the small collection…

A recent Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is shown above. The point was to illustrate that star trails really are evidence of our rotation as a planet.

Are photographs of star trails really evidence of the Earth’s rotation about its axis? Yes they are, and science journalist Trudy E. Bell…

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii has two new instruments called HARP and ACSIS.They work in conjunction and together they recently took measurements of the Orion Nebula and assocaited Giant Molecular Cloud (GMC). These new instruments, called “revolutionary” by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), record the…

Haven’t seen much that I’ve liked in the Astrophotography group on Flickr lately but I went trawling earlier and found this lovely capture of the ISS from someone’s back garden. Thought it was worth sharing.

Mars is back, and doing things it shouldn’t! Our warring friend started May in the constellation Aquarius, it then moved into Pisces on the 8th. For a really cool thing (if you’re utterly geeky like me) you should look up between the 24th and 29th when it cuts across the…

Researchers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope used the infrared telescope to map temperature variations over the surface of a giant gas planet, HD 189733b, revealing it likely is whipped by roaring winds. Using the data they have created what they call the first weather map of an exoplanet.

You can read…

A while ago I posted about the Bullet Cluster, and an image which seems to reveal the dark matter within it. Now a new image from Hubble seems to do the same thing for the galaxy cluster CL0024+17.

Now I am personally rather sceptical about the validity of images such as…

Octogenarians should not be put in charge of policy at the BBC. (Link). God bless Sir Patrick for not being PC, but it did make me cringe. We should be able to say what we mean of course and in that spirit I think he’s being pig-headed and an old…

NASA’s Chandra observatory, in unison with ground-based optical telescopes, has relased details of a supernova from last September which is the brightest ever recorded. SN 2006gy exploded in galaxy NGC 1260 and was the brightest such event ever seen. NGC 1260 is 240 million light years away and the supernoa…

I was listening to the May edition of the Jodcast earlier and they were talking to one Carole Mundell who works at the Liverpool Telescope with Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs).

GRBs are highly energetic, and extremely short-lived flashed of gamma rays that are seen all over the sky. They were first detected…

The Darwin Lecture for the National Astronomy Meeting 2007 was given by Dr. Reinhard Genzel. He spoke about the black hole which sits at the centre of the Milky Way, our own galaxy.

Early infrared astronomy showed very fast motions in the central mass of the galaxy. 20 years later we…

This week’s Astrolunch talk was given by Vanessa Stroud from the Faulkes Telescope Group. As is always the case though, this talk was unrelated to her PhD research and she was talking about a new example of a certain type of nova that has been found using GalEx, the Galaxy Evolution…