Light pollution, also known as photopollution or luminous pollution, is excess or obtrusive light created by humans. Among other effects, it disrupts ecosystems, can cause adverse health effects, obscures the stars for city dwellers, and interferes with astronomical observatories. Light pollution is a side effect of industrial civilization.read more | digg…

There’s a new Carnival of Space out, this week hosted by Visual Astronomy. It features yours truly among others. Check it out!

Carnival of Space #39

Tonight: Venus and Jupiter are 1° apart. Jupiter is below Venus. The two will pass tomorrow. Jupiter is getting higher and Venus is getting lower each morning. Look to the southeast for the pair of bright planets.

Link to Skynotes

Tonight: Mars ends its retrograge motion. Planets usually move west to east against the background stars. Since mid November, Mars has been moving backwards, east to west. It”s in Taurus now and will start moving eastward and move back towards Gemini.

Link to Skynotes

A young star is speeding away from the Milky Way so fast that astronomers have been puzzled by where it came from; based on its young age it has traveled too far to have come from our galaxy. read more | digg story

The recent pass of Comet Holmes and today’s close approach of Asteroid 2007 TU24 (shown below, image from space.com) have gotten me thinking again about open source astronomy. I have always been fascinated by the internet and how modern networking technologies bring things into one big mesh, and astronomy fits…

Stuart over at Astronomy Blog is breaking the bad news that the UK is now going to have to completely pull out of Gemini. All future UK observations are cancelled. These are not good times for UK astronomy.

The UK will no longer have access to the largest professional telescopes in…

For most people, it’s enough to see their paper plane fly for a few feet. The Japanese, however, want to send one 240 miles… through space.read more | digg story

Tonight: Mars is high in the east at dusk. Look for Mars near the tips of the horns of Taurus the Bull. Mars is shining at -0.7 magnitude. Compare its magnitude to other nearby stars of the winter sky. Sirius is -1.4, Betelgeuse shines at 0.57 and Aldebaran is 1.0…

Discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey on October 11 last year, this 150-600m asteroid will closely approach the Earth in the next few days. It will pass within 1.4 lunar distances (roughly 335,000 miles) on January 29th at about 8a.m. GMT. It will almost reach magnitude 10 between the 29th…

Tonight: Venus and Jupiter are shining bright, low in the southeast 6° apart. Venus is shining at -3.9 magnitude. Jupiter is fainter at -1.7 magnitude. Saturn is in the WSW shining at 0.4 magnitude. Remember, the higher the magnitude number, the fainter the object is.

Link to Skynotes

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NASA’s current plan for manned space exploration focuses on establishing a base on the moon, as a stepping stone for a visit to Mars. The initiative has been trumpeted by the Bush administration. But trouble is brewing as a growing group of former mission managers, planetary scientists and astronauts argues…

These are the top stories from the Digg Space category for the week ending Saturday 26th of January 2008:

• 1 Tourist Spaceship Has Been Unveiled
• 2 Asteroid 2007 TU24 to Pass Close to Earth on Jan.29
• 3 Female Figure on Mars Just a Rock
• 4 Virgin Galactic Unveils Passenger Spaceships!!
• 5 Near-Earth Asteroid 2007 TU24…

The Internet group Anonymous has declared war on Scientology and has begun by attacking the cult’s website with a denial of service attack. Usually content to mess with fanatical or disturbing online groups, Anonymous has said that it believes Scientology to be a threat to mankind and stated that they…

Galaxies and clusters of galaxies are not uniformly distributed in the Universe, instead they collect into vast clusters and sheets and walls of galaxies interspersed with large voids in which very few galaxies seem to exist. The map above shows many of these superclusters including the Virgo supercluster.read more | digg…

Yes, I’m little last to the game on this one, but since loads of kids have asked me about it this week, I thought I’d post. Virgin has revealed the design on SpaceShipTwo (hint: it looks like a big version of SpaceShipOne) which will be flying paying customers into sub-orbital…

This is an awesome, and much discussed post from the Planetary Society blog: http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001305/

…think to yourself: this is Mars. I’m staring through the eyes of a rover that was only supposed to survive three months, maybe six, possibly a little longer; yet it’s been four Earth years since Spirit landed,…

I’ll put this one to you as simply as possible. It’s a picture from one of the Mars rovers that appears to show a person (or a rock), walking along the Martian surface. This person (or rock, probably) looks so much like that classic Big Foot picture that it makes…

Originally posted in August 2007.

There was a New Scientist feature last week on Boltzmann Brains. Now I hadn’t heard of these before, and so I thought it may be worth a blog post. A Blotzmann Brain is an intelligent, self-aware entity which arises as the result of a random fluctuation in…

In a landmark launch that will supposedly “contribute to bridging the digital divide within Africa and between Africa and the rest of the world,” the continent’s first satellite successfully made it into orbit aboard a French-made rocket last night.

The Digg comments are hilarious, too. read more | digg story

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These are the top stories from the Digg Space category for the week ending Saturday 19th of January 2008:

• 1 The recent SETI Contact is reported FALSE
• 2 Black Holes Spinning Near the Speed of Light
• 3 Saturn Sounds (WEIRDER THAN JUPITER) Signal at 1:33 Creepy
• 4 Jupiter sounds (so strange!) NASA-Voyager recording
• 5 NASA Unveils…

Funding for astronomy and physics is being cut in the UK. This site is a rallying point for those who want to protest this. Go here, write to your MP, tell anyone who might care and then some that won’t. Then just tell a random person at a bus stop.…

People from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was…

Okay this gets a bit tenuous, but what the hell? If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch and live in any of my Over Twitter feed cities (Aix, Birmingham, Belfast, Cardiff, Dublin, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Indianapolis, Honolulu, Mauna Kea, Manchester, Milton Keynes, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Sydney)…

This is a cool idea: a space book for the visually impaired and blind. Using a combination of braille, embossing and textured images, this amazing new book is aiming to bring space and its beauty to a new slice of the demographic pie.

(This is good timing for the internet, what…

You will now start to see the Link Log appearing on Orbiting Frog.’s main pages These are the links that pop up between posts in a darker grey box. Rather than appearing in the general RSS feed, these are links to sites I regular visit and which I’d like to…

Tonight: Jupiter is 15° to the lower left of Venus. Keep watching as the two bright planets converge on February 1st. Look for the pair in the dawn sky low in the southeast. Tonight: In the evening sky, watch the Moon move towards the Pleiades star cluster. The Moon will…

UKIRT, the UK InfraRed Telescope which sits on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, has recently released a set of data from the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS).

For the past five years, UKIRT has been scanning the sky systematically in five different infrared windows. By the end of the survey in…

From YouTube, a NASA-Voyager recording.read more | digg story

Tonight: When measuring degrees across the sky, the most convenient ruler is your fist. Your fist held at arm”s length covers about 10°. This evening the Moon is about 4 fists from the planet Mars, or 40°. Jupiter and Venus in the morning sky are a fist and a half…

The MESSENGER spacecraft flew past Mercury on Monday evening in one of three scheduled slow-down fly-bys before it begins orbiting the planet in a few years. The first images (there are going to be a LOT of them) will now begin to appear. This image from a press release out…