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 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.

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

This is a nice link from Digg about concepts for space stations. just goes to show how varied and wide the shapes and sizes for space-faring vehicles could get, if only we could get to the future and build them already!

read more | digg story

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!…

I recently saw a Digg article which linked to a space.com page about the 10 Strangest Things in Space. All but 2 of the items were not pictures at all but computer simulations, or artists impressions. So here to correct this injustice to phenomena everywhere I present the REAL 10 Strangest…

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…

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…

This image appeared on APOD the other day. It shows a solar eclipse as viewed from space. Very cool.

This image was taken from the old MIR station during the August 11th 1999 eclipse which was, if you can remember, visible from the UK. In fact if you look very…

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…

Here’s a great image of all the bodies in the Solar System in order of size. It only goes down to a diameter of 200 miles - otherwise it would get very silly indeed. Note that several planets fall after several moons in the rankings. also note the small collection…