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…

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,…

If you haven’t already then now is the time to subscribe to the Twitter feeds I made for many cities around the world. As of about the 4th of October it will once again become dark enough that the International Space Station (ISS) will become visible in the evenings over…

There is a lot more to the universe than the light you and I can pick up with our eyes and brains. Although its a shame that we can’t see them naturally we can use technology to reveal the wavelengths of light normally invisible to us. Visible light is only part of the electromagnetic spectrum (a very small part) and I thought it would be interesting to see some familiar objects in unfamiliar ways.

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…

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…

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…

I had my first day working for SETPOINT Wales yesterday in their mobile planetarium, the Stardome. I went to Crickhowell High School and had a great (if tiring day) giving a space talk and showing, what felt like hundreds of children, the constellations.

The reason I like talking about space is…

If the tail was smarter, the tail would wag the dog.

Two things have just come back to me at the same time and collided wonderfully, thanks to an article over at Universe Today. The article is one about the liquid mirror telescope that a NASA researcher proposes could be built…

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…

What follows is my submitted entry for the Wellcome Trust’s New Scientist Essay Competition 2007. There are prizes involved and the top one is publication of the essay in New Scientist. I am very inexperienced with such things, but thought I’d enter anyway, so just in case I don’t win,…