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!

Stephen Colbert interviewed International Space Station resident and Wriststrong supporter, Garret Reisman during his May 8th edition.

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,…

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.

If, like me, you’ve been lucky enough to have flown with an airline that stocks the Sky Mall catalogue then you’ll know it’s brilliant. This is a magazine specially designed for people who have been sitting on an aeroplane for hours and have nothing to do. Why else would you buy…

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 had a question via email asking about Comet Holmes. I thought that by answering it on the blog, maybe others would also have some questions answered. so, thanks to Marycie for her question.

Comet Holmes was a very dim, and expected comet. Until October last year. During the period…

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…

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.

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.

Found this image via Digg and it’s so cool I thought I’d share. One of those pictures where the the photographer captured something we’re all fairly used to seeing in a different way.

Don’t forget to Digg it…

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…

My LookUp web app has been mentioned on TUAW. It tells you when to spot various satellites including the ISS over just about anywhere in the world. Another app that the article mentions is iSkyGaze which tells you lots of other things. This is actually something I have been working on…

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…

Just a quick note to point out Stuart’s post at the Astronomy Blog, showing off some packaging for a telescope produced by Oxford University:

I am tempted to write to them, but worry about offending them. Probably because I’m a Libra.

[via Astronomy Blog]

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…

Look Up (v1.0) is an iPhone (or iPod touch) web application that can tell you when to look out for satellites in the night sky. It covers pretty much anywhere in the world and predicts transits for the International Space Station, Hubble, Envisat, Genesis 1 and 2 and for a short…

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…

Yes, I’m little last to the game on this one, but since loads of kids have asked me about it this week, I thought I’d post. Virgin has revealed the design on SpaceShipTwo (hint: it looks like a big version of SpaceShipOne) which will be flying paying customers into sub-orbital…

Originally posted in August 2007.

There was a New Scientist feature last week on Boltzmann Brains. Now I hadn’t heard of these before, and so I thought it may be worth a blog post. A Blotzmann Brain is an intelligent, self-aware entity which arises as the result of a random fluctuation in…