Finally my paper studying the Ophiuchus star-forming region is done and dusted and has been accepted for publication. Today it appeared on the online research paper service, astro-ph and it be published properly by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in (hopefully) the near future.

I have finally seen the (former) planet Pluto, thanks to some very dark skies and a decent telescope. Here’s a quick overview and some information about the dark, cold and very distant dwarf planet.

I have been experimenting with astrophotography from my current, dark location in the south of France. However I am stuck and need some help in both taking and then processing the images. I know there are loads of photographic astronomers out there - I need you!

“Prof Chandra Wickramasinghe and Dr Janaki Wickramasinghe claim Venus’s clouds contain chemicals that are consistent with the presence of micro organisms.”

These two are from Cardiff’s centre for Astrobiology and the elder of the two has singlehandedly given the field a bad name over the past twenty years.

The whole concept of…

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

• 1 Incredible Views of Jupiter [PICS]
• 2 APOD: Spitzer”s M101
• 3 Edgar Mitchell UFO interview
• 4 7 Ways Star Trek aka Gene Roddenberry Changed the World
• 5 The Extremely Long Odds Against the Destruction of Earth

To…

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…

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.

These are the top stories from the Digg Space category for the week ending Saturday 12th of July 2008:

• 1 Spot the Space Station
• 2 Pluto Gets Respect: Dwarf Planets to Be Called “Plutoids”
• 3 Mystery of the Great Attractor Pulling the Milky Way
• 4 Rare “Star-Making Machine” Discovered In a Distant Universe
• 5 Discovery…

Was just looking through the App Store on iTunes and found an astronomy application for the iPhone/iPod Touch called Starmap. It will be fun to play with this tomorrow when I can actually install any of these apps. Why Apple has let me browse and buy these things a full day before I can even use them, I don’t know. (Screenshots inside).

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.

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.

The top stories from the Digg Space category for the week ending Saturday 05th of July 2008.

I love that this happened just down the road from where I live. Police called out to a 999 call about an unexplained object in the night sky solved the mystery straight away for their when they realised it was actually the Moon. Well worth listening to.

We did a cool experiment last Wednesday about the UV properties of various liquids. It yielded this very cool picture which looks like something from science fiction.

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.

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

There is a new batch of astronomy blogs to be inspected. This cohort hails from the Discovery Channel and here I dissect and review them all. Why? Not sure really, seemed like a good idea to spread the word. They seem like a good bunch of space people.

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

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.

President Sarkozy is looking for UK support to bolster his ideas as France takes over the ESA presidency today. He wants to lead Europe into space in a way that doesn’t leave it trailing the likes of Indian, China and Japan.

A radiation incident has stalled work on SCUBA2, meaning the high-tech submillimetre camera is once again delayed.