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,…

Mars is back, and doing things it shouldn’t! Our warring friend started May in the constellation Aquarius, it then moved into Pisces on the 8th. For a really cool thing (if you’re utterly geeky like me) you should look up between the 24th and 29th when it cuts across the…

A while ago I posted about the Bullet Cluster, and an image which seems to reveal the dark matter within it. Now a new image from Hubble seems to do the same thing for the galaxy cluster CL0024+17.

Now I am personally rather sceptical about the validity of images such…

This week’s Astrolunch talk was given by Vanessa Stroud from the Faulkes Telescope Group. As is always the case though, this talk was unrelated to her PhD research and she was talking about a new example of a certain type of nova that has been found using GalEx, the Galaxy Evolution…

I don’t know how they found out about it but someone at Uni today showed me this rather funny Google Maps result. Ask for directions from somewhere in the USA to somewhere in Europe and you are told how to do it, without flying. I searched for Cardiff to New…

I have started reading The Feynman Lectures in Physics. Overall there are three volumes to collection. They were created from a two year course in physics given by Richard P. Feynman, a professor at Caltech and a Physics Nobel Prize winner. I am finding the books not only refreshing (they…

I’ve just had another ‘Philiosophy of Science’ meeting where we were talking about social responsibility. The topic of the Manhattan Project came up and the Hiroshima and Nagisaki bombs as well as the Challenger Distaster and Columbia. We ended up discussing how many people die every year globally and how…

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…

I love this picture. It comes from the Flickr Astrophotography group, which is featured in the sidebar of Orbiting Frog. I didn’t know that one could capture a sunspot during a sunset but it seems you really can.
Go and check out fdecomite’s photos and…

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…

For a week now, NASA has been trying to get back in touch with the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft that has been in space for over a decade now.

The MGS has for ten years been scouting out future landing sites for NASA whilst also returning amazing images during its…

I have decided that instead of painstakingly creating my own page of Night Sky info each month i shall simply link to a very good one from the BBC. Its succinct, its to the point and is frankly better than mine anyway!

The link to this page can be found…

Skywatchers, ho! The Leonid meteor shower is now kicking off right above our heads. This often spectaculat shower results from the Earth’s passage through trails of particles left behind by comet Tempel-Tuttell. Tempel-Tuttle was itself discovered by two people independently, in 1865 and 1866.

In 1833 the Leonids were so…

The last time it happened was in 2003 and the next time will be 2016. The November 2006 transit of Mercury was watched by millions of people and a few spacecraft too.

Occuring between the evening of Wednesday 8th of November to the morning of Thursday 9th, GMT, Mercury appeared…

A couple of weeks ago I posted regarding the changing size of the Moon as seen from the Earth due to its elliptical orbit. The question was raised initially due to a conversation a friend of mine had with someone who thought that a large Moon was a harvest moon…

Well today is day three (techincally) of my PhD. Monday was just an enrolment day and so yesterday was my first hands on day in the office. It is nice to be back. i’m not really wandering the same corridors as I did before and due to my two year…

Welcome to Orbiting Frog.

I have always loved space and to look up at te night sky. I got my first telescope at around the age of twelve and ever since, I’ve been hooked. I now own a neat little Meade ETX-70 and am studying for my PhD in Astrophysics.…

The object that caused so much confusion in 2003 by being bigger than Pluto has now been named. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) which recently demoted Pluto from ‘planet’ to ‘dwarf planet’ after the discovery of the object (formerly known as 2003 UB313) has decided to call that object Eris,…

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……

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…