It’ll be upon us before we know it: 2009 is less than three months away! It will be the International Year of Astronomy and as part of the festivities, a new podcast is being launched. Every day, a new episode of 365 Days of Astronomy will become available for your listening pleasure.…

I have a copy of The Universe Season Two to give away to one lucky Twitterer. Read more about this great space documentary series here and find out how to win a copy.

Just wanted to point out this wonderful xkcd comic. I like that it ends (or starts, if you like) with ‘folks’. This is why I love xkcd.

xkcd - A Webcomic - Height

The Jules Verne ATV, which was launched earlier this year by ESA to aid in deliveries to the ISS, will burn up today in a controlled fireball re-entry. The main event kicks off around midday (UT), as the spacecraft descends into the Pacific Ocean.

It has been a very busy Summer for me, and now it looks to be a very busy Autumn. This week I will be running the .Astronomy Conference, a meeting about networked astronomy and the new media. I recently submitted a telescope proposal for time on the JCMT. I have…

These are the top stories from the Digg Space category for the week ending Saturday 13th of September 2008:

• 1 NASA Photo of Hurricane Ike From the Space Station
• 2 NASA Has Plans for Nuclear Reactor Under Surface of The Moon
• 3 Aliens might have sent messages by tweaking variable stars
• 4 “Galactic internet” proposed
• 5…

The LHC goes online today. Here are some cool numbers.

These are the top stories from the Digg Space category for the week ending Saturday 06th of September 2008:

• 1 NASA to Explore the "Secret Layer" of the Sun
• 2 “Anyone Who Thinks The LHC Will Destroy The World is a Twat"
• 3 APOD: Milky Way Road Trip
• 4 Closest Look Yet at Milky Way”s…

I was tinkering about earlier and created this automator script, which changes my desktop image to be today’s APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day). This is Mac OS X only.

These are the top stories from the Digg Space category for the week ending Saturday 16th of August 2008:

• 1 APOD: Facing NGC 6946
• 2 Experts: Reliance on Russia makes NASA weak
• 3 Phoenix Microscope Takes 1st Image Of Martian Dust Particle
• 4 Buzz Aldrin on the Future of Mars and Private Space
• 5 MIT solves…

Flickr user FlintstoneStargazer captured all 110 of the Messier Objects between March 7th and August 6th this year. They have all been compiled into a big mosaic.

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.