Continuing my series of posts regarding Google Sky and Google Earth, here is a KMZ file that will let you find some of the prominent and interesting space telescopes and satellites on Google Earth. This file includes real-time position tracking and 1 hour flight paths for 9 different space telescopes and satellites.

Trailers seem to be the ‘in thing’ these days. There is a (very long) trailer for the BLAST experiment’s movie somewhere out on the internet. Today, this very nice trailer popped up in my Twitter feed from Stuart at Astronomy Blog. It’s for the International Year of Astronomy, also known…

My two previous posts have covered what ESA is currently working on and and what ESA may be doing in the decade 2015-2025. So what happens next? Well it may seem crazy to speculate on what we will be sending into space almost twenty years from now, but these things taken…

In a previous post I gave a quick run down of where ESA currently stands with regard to missions into space. Now for the lowdown on where they intend to be after 2015. Cosmic Vision is ESA’s plan for the decade 2015-2025.

The aims of Cosmic Vision are divided into four…

We had a talk yesterday from Dr. Fabio Favata titled “Space Astronomy in ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 plan”. Cosmic Vision is the European Space Agency’s peculiar name for its plan over the next decade and a bit. The talk was very good, and covered almost the whole breadth of ESA’s…

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…

There are big ideas and then there are big ideas. The Large Synoptic Survey telescope is a massive idea. The proposal is to build a telescope in Chile that will survey the entire sky in just a matter of days, at high resolution.

The team have drafted in Google to…

Stuart (Astronomy Blog) has been busy working on the telescope XML that has been discussed before. Well he has actually posted some working feeds in what he called STML (see post title).

In response I’ve tried to create Google Sky equivalent KML files. These just read in the STML feeds and…

Stuart over at Astronomy Blog is trying to organise the creation of an XML structure for astronomical observations. He proposed the idea a short while ago but has recently posted anew with regard to getting some help in creating an XML schema for this new kind of feed. This sort of…

This is an Infra Red telescope with a 30m dish found in Sierra Nevada, Spain. I have used data from this scope in my own research and hadn’t realised quite how cool it looked in reality.

So my name is now on a (soon-to-be) published paper. How and why this happened is a little over my head, but I shall try to explain. One thing you should know however, is that I haven’t really done anything so far to help get this paper out. I haven’t…

This is a lovely long-exposure photo where the telescope dome has been rotated to allow the shot to appear to show the whole scope. The 0.8m telescope is the Haute-Provence Observatory built in 1937 near the current site of St.Michel l’Observatoire. I once went to…

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…

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…

I know this is literally yesterday’s news but here is my take on the story anyway. Researchers using the ESO 3.6m telescope in Chile have analysed the wobble of a star known as Gliese 581 (centre of starfield below). This star is about 20 light years away. Previously, a Neptune-like planet…

So Hubble is now 17 years old and so NASA/ESA have released some incredible pictures take with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) of the Carina Nebula. This nebula contains one of the largest known stars Eta Carinae, which is a highly unpredictable variable with a brightness greater than 4…

These days we’ve all seen pictures of other worlds in stunning detail. We are familiar with pictures of the Moon and of the Earth and well know that the circles we see online and on paper are really globes, floating around in outer space. Now NASA’s STEREO mission to observe the…

At NAM I heard a great talk by Gary Fuller on Methanol Masers (a sort of laser created by gas in space). Whilst I find the topic quite interesting its a bit beyond this blog for now. However the telescope used as part of his research is the Parkes 64m telescope…