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.

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…

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.

Soon I will be off on an observing run in Hawaii. I will be using the 15m JCMT telescope on Mauna Kea to take spectral line data using an instrument called HARP.

Since this will be my first professional expedition I will be taking lots of pictures and notes as…

Astronomy Blog gives a great little overview of the upcoming meteor shower, including a top pic from Stellarium. I love this shower because I’m often in France for it where I can much better skies.

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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…

So I’m still musing about the reasons for studying star formation and so I have begun trying to think in a more positive way. This is what I came up with earlier today…

Star formation is a science at a turning point. It will not be long now before astronomers…

I’ve just spent the weekend in Rome. In fact I had one of the best holidays ever running around the Italian capital and generally being silly with my friends. We also visited the Vatican, naturally, and so upon returning home I thought I should do a Roman Catholic Orbiting Frog…

Big doesn’t quite cover this blog post.

For the past few weeks in my role as a demonstrator in the first year undergraduates lab, I have been supervising the experiment titled Large Scale Structure of the Universe. The experiment itself is a slightly painful exercise involving a series of simulated…

My friend Louis asked me the other day whether gravity is different at the equator than at the poles. This was in response to learning that the Earth is wider as the equator and not precisely spherical. Its a good question. He then followed it up with ‘how does gravity…

In my blog post on Meteorites I mentioned the Moon formation theory regarding what is known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis. This theory is widely becoming regarded as the best model science has for the Moon’s formation.

Regardless of the evidence for and against this model, here is how it works……

A good, straightforward question - I like it. They’re round because they’re huge!

Basically the spherical shape of planets and stars comes from the fact that they contain so much mass that they have reasonably sized gravitational fields. The mass in any object pulls other masses in toward it. Just…

The other day there was a partial Lunar eclipse (shown in this photo from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website). A friend of mine, James, noted that the Moon was really big that night too as it rose with a chunk missing in the evening. The size is exaggerated in…

There are many categories, or classes, into which a star can form, based its temperature and luminosity. The size of the star is related to these factors. Supergiant stars are typically 10,000 times brighter than the Sun and 100 to 1000 time larger (that is that they have a radius…

According to Space.com, there are now over 10,000 man-made satellites orbiting the Earth. A few hundred are big enough and fly close enough to the Earth that they are visible. This list includes the International Space Station (ISS) and NASA’s space shuttles.

In the case of the latter two examples,…

A star or constellation that is always visible (i.e. that never sets) is known as circumpolar. Dependent on where you are in the world different stars will be circumpolar. To explain this more fully we need to understand why the stars set at all.

The stars above our heads are…