This one could just be filed under ‘this is really cool’. Also, I can’t believe it has passed me by my entire life. Have you ever heard of a solar furnace? It’s a James- Bond-esque creation which focusses light from the sun on a massive scale to heat a very…

Today is February 29th, the ‘extra’ day we are given every four years to bring the calendar back into sync with the actual time it takes the Earth to go around the Sun. Leap years are actually much more complicated than most people think with exceptions every 100 years, but…

In my previous post, detailing tonight’s Lunar Eclipse (the last until December 2010), I included a YouTube video I made showing what you might expect to see if it is clear. Well included here is the same video plus two more showing the same event from the perspective of the…

We had a talk yesterday from Dr. Fabio Favata titled “Space Astronomy in ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 plan”. Cosmic Vision is the European Space Agency’s peculiar name for its plan over the next decade and a bit. The talk was very good, and covered almost the whole breadth of ESA’s…

This Wednesday there will be a total eclipse of the Moon. Totality will last for 51 minutes and will be visible throughout Europe, North America, the Pacific region and Northern Africa. The show kicks off at 00:35 GMT when the Earth’s penumbra touches the limb of the Moon. Totality occurs…

A new 11-year sunspot cycle is about to begin, according to some blogs and other sources. I know very little about the Sun but am pretty sure that nothing disastrous is going to happen when a new cycle begins.

The Sun runs an 11-year cycle, which affects the number of visible…

I love NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, known to its friends as APOD. So to honour that Great website, which has been running for more than a decade, I here present my own personal top ten list of APODs. They may not be quite the same as anyone else…

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…

This image from Flickr shows the rising Sun as it glows through the clouds. It is quite reminiscent of nebula containing or reflecting powerful light from stellar nurseries and is a good reminder that sometimes these nebulae are not always as…