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.

Oh to to be able see in the infra-red! This image is a composite of pivot irrigation systems near Garden City, Kansas is a false-color composite image made using near infrared, red, and green wavelengths. To get the most out of this image you have to click on it and…

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.

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.

Many animals have been put into space. Here I list my favourite space critters, including the Orbiting Frogs for which this very blog is named.

The Japanese Moon-mapping craft, Selene, has been busy. A preliminary release of what will be the best map of the Moon ever created, shows the topology and mineral content of the Moon’s surface.

There is an interesting conversation taking place on Universe Today. You’ll currently find a list of short answers to the question ‘what is the value of space exploration?’ from a series of Astronomy Bloggers.

My favourite quotes so far are “It would be useful to know about the cosmos, rather…

ESA have released information on the incredible content of the skies above our heads. In their press release they outline what exactly is littering orbital space around the Earth.

The image here shows the view from above the North Pole of all low Earth orbit objects as of January 2008.…

This is more art than science, but it is very pretty. Stereoscopic 3D images give full colour and allow each nebula to show another dimension of beauty.

Dugg from Daily Galaxy: NASA is serious about launching the most difficult mission ever attempted by the human race - putting an astronaut on Mars. The voyage will cover hundreds of millions of miles and take two and half years round trip.

read more | digg story

The much anticipated SCUBA-2 instrument has been installed on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii. The question is how did they manage to get one very large and expensive piece of kit inside another? Here are some photos from the JAC website.

This is my second conference poster and it is going up at the UK National Astronomy meeting in a couple of weeks. It will found in the Star Formation section of the conference proceedings. I have taken data from the HARP instrument on the JCMT and processed it as 3D…

As if Canadarm wasn’t the best name of anything in space (it’s a Canadian arm for the International Space Station), the Canadian Space Agency has now put Dextre into space. What is Dextre? Well he’s the hand to Canadarm’s arm.

The team that built him have kept referring to him as…

This is my first poster for a conference and it is going up at the UK National Astronomy meeting in a couple of weeks. Based on my SCUBA layer for Google Sky, it will found in the Education and Outreach section during the conference.

Orbiting Frog has been a busy place in 2008! We are only a small way into the year but already Orbiting Frog seems to have overspilled to the extent to which I feel the need to recap and regroup. So just in case you missed anything, here is a quick…

We just had a great star formation talk from Professor Ralf Klessen from the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the Center for Astronomy at Heidelberg University. During that talk he put up a great slide showing the famous Pillars of Creation from the Eagle Nebula (M16) in both infrared and the…

UPDATE: New Google Earth tracking files for Space Telescopes are now up.

Hot on the heels of putting all the SCUBA data onto Google Sky, I am now sharing some Google Earth goodies. The KML files below will allow you to view the location of any satellite on Google Earth with…

Over the summer I created a Google Sky layer that enabled anyone to access the entire SCUBA submm catalogue of maps and objects in a dynamic fashion. Google Sky was released in August and the open file format means anyone can create data for display. This layer is now publicly…

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…