Behold the view from 117,597 feet, taken on August 11, 2007 by a camera hanging from a helium balloon launched by a group of guys in Alberta, Canada. Called the SABLE-3 (Southern Alberta Balloon Launch Experiment #3), it was packed with a Byonics MicroTrak 300 APRS tracking device, a Nikon…

As a fan of Moon Landing rebuttals and a big Wriststrong supporter, I would love to see this happen. Phill vs Stephen.

I love NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, known to its friends as APOD. So to honour that Great website, which has been running for more than a decade, I here present my own personal top ten list of APODs. They may not be quite the same as anyone else…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A giant hole in the Universe is devoid of galaxies, stars and even lacks dark matter, astronomers said on Thursday. The team at the University of Minnesota said the void is nearly a billion light-years across…

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A religious debate may be brewing in the comment thread on my 10 Things post. All views welcome…

A recent BBC News article has prompted a couple of people to mention ‘this thing called SCUBA’ to me. The article is about the new SCUBA-2 submillimetre camera that has been built at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh (with more than a little help from Cardiff University and a couple of…

Stuart puts APOD on Twitter. Cool idea.

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Colorado Meteor
Originally uploaded by Mr Geoff.

Yes its that time of year again, get your 12 things ready and then pootle outside to watch the Perseids. This meteor shower peaks on Sunday night (I think) but you can catch some good shooting stars anytime up to about Tuesday really.

This photo is from…

Astronomy Blog gives a great little overview of the upcoming meteor shower, including a top pic from Stellarium. I love this shower because I’m often in France for it where I can much better skies.

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I’m just prepping another post at the moment but came across this great animation on my travels. It shows Jupiter as seen from the Chandra satellite, which captures X-Ray information. As you see from the (hopefully moving) picture below, Jupiter is mostly invisible when seen in the X-Ray. You can however…

If you haven’t heard of Photosynth, its an incredible idea from Microsoft’s labs (yes they do cool stuff too!). Basically the concept is that as more and more photos are taken of a particular object or location the better a computer could get at creating a sort of simulated view…

I think that Orbiting Frog is now back online. I have moved to Site5 for the hosting and the domain is transitioned so far as I can tell. I’m sorry for any inconvenience this has caused and to all those people trying to get to My 10 Strangest Things post, it…

Every year it comes around now, the email that says Mars will be as big as the Full Moon in August this year. It is a junk email that was a misinterpretation of a Mars approach from 2003 and I’m glad to see that the Bad Astronomer is talking about…

“These spectacular images are the most detailed pictures of Earth ever seen.” Or so says th article - however I’m not sure its quite so true as they don’t link to the high-res images themselves. However it is of note I feel.

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