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!

The BBC is running a video of Yves Rossy, a Swiss man who jumped from a plane and then flew using his homemade jet-propelled glider. The image above shows a previous version of the glider, which only has two jet engines. The model flown this week used four. Mr. Rossy,…

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.

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…

This one could just be filed under ‘this is really cool’. Also, I can’t believe it has passed me by my entire life. Have you ever heard of a solar furnace? It’s a James- Bond-esque creation which focusses light from the sun on a massive scale to heat a very…

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.

Well what do you know, as soon as I make myself a wavelength slider for Google Sky, Google go ahead and pass me by by releasing the much anticipated web version of Google Sky complete with wavelength sliders. I still like my little mashup but I look forward to playing…

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…

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…

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…

Here are some of my personal favourite wallpapers for your desktop (and iPhone). Sizes 1900×1200, 1024×768, 1280×800 and 800×600 are all here to fill your eyes with spacey goodness. Let your own scattering of icons sit amongst glorious nebula and spectacular scenes!

I usually have a nice space picture as my…

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…

The Internet group Anonymous has declared war on Scientology and has begun by attacking the cult’s website with a denial of service attack. Usually content to mess with fanatical or disturbing online groups, Anonymous has said that it believes Scientology to be a threat to mankind and stated that they…

Okay this gets a bit tenuous, but what the hell? If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch and live in any of my Over Twitter feed cities (Aix, Birmingham, Belfast, Cardiff, Dublin, Edinburgh, Hong Kong, Indianapolis, Honolulu, Mauna Kea, Manchester, Milton Keynes, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Sydney)…

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…

My Ten Strangest Things in Space was picked up by fark.com yesterday and thus another 10,000 hits have battered my Site5 servers. Amongst the comment section of the fark entry was a picture that really made me laugh. A user called Lamune_Baba has modified the solar spectrum to create this:

Hilarious!…