May 22nd and 23rd will be providing some excellent opportunities for seeing the International Space Station from Europe and North America. The details of each sighting vary from place to place, but it is safe to say that the two days and nights will be offering some of the best sightings for a long time!

Using the microwave oven in your kitchen, you can measure a fundamental property of the universe: the speed of light. All you need are some tasty marshmallows and a ruler.

China’s Fengyun 1C satellite, which was destroyed intentionally by China last year, still presents a risk to satellites and other orbiting bodies. I have created a Google Earth file which will let you track the debris in real-time.

I have updated and fixed the files for tracking satellites and the ISS on Google Earth. You are no longer offered driving directions to the satellites either.

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…

I’ve been wishing there was a wavelength slider in Google Sky ever since it launched and so I have tried to make one. Well I’ve started to make one and thought I’d share. In place of an actual wavelength slider, I have hijacked the time slider and so each wavelength…

With the recent news that we will beaming the Beatles to Polaris, I got to thinking about good songs that are space related. Here’s what I came up with:

• Science Fiction Double Feature from the Rocky Horror Picture Show [Amazon]
• Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft by The Carpenters [Amazon] [iTunes]
• Space Truckin’ by…

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…

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,…

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…

Here’s a cool thing: I now have a picture of my retinas. Below you can see both my eyes (left then right in case you were wondering) in full colour, as photographed by my optician. Whilst explaining to me what I was looking at, she also told me something I…

The Over Cardiff and related Twitter feeds should now only issue warnings when the weather is fine. This has been achieved using Yahoo! Weather’s RSS API, which returns the weather for each location when the script checks for visible ISS passes.

In case you don’t know, Over Cardiff is one…

I have been playing with Google Sky recently. As a sort of case-study, I made for myself a little script that overlays data from NASA’s SkyView website onto Google Sky. If you don’t know, SkyView dubs itself a ‘virtual telescope’. Essentially its a way to look up regions of the sky…

I finally caught the Space Station in Cardiff last night.

Having rained on me all day, it finally cleared up and was almost cloudless at both times for the ISS going over. Caught a few crappy photos, one of which is right here. You can see the ISS as a…

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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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…

Just the other day I was opining about how the internet needs to get in bed with science a bit more. Well lo and behold here is a fantastic example of just such a thing: Galaxy Zoo.

I saw the link on Chris Lintott’s blog and then later on Digg, but…

The other day we were driving along and I found out that a friend of mine’s father is a commercial airline pilot. We chatted about it for a while - apparently his mother was an air hostess and that’s how they met - and I mentioned that he must have…

There is a new podcast called Living Space in the world of astronomy which is, according to the website,

…a collaboration between Chris Lintott (Oxford University and BBC Sky at Night) and Harriet Scott (Heart FM) to bring you the latest news from the worlds of astronomy and spaceflight.

and as far…

You may recall I blogged about The Jodcast. There are some podcasts I find I listen to on my iPod and there others I listen to on my Mac. The former is easy but the latter can be annoying - you have to open iTunes and open it there etc…