I was tinkering about earlier and created this automator script, which changes my desktop image to be today’s APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day). This is Mac OS X only.

Tonight, July 5, look west and you’ll see a temporary “Belt of Three Stars”. Saturn, Mars and the star Regulus are sitting by Leo in a chance alignment that literally will only happen tonight. Very cool.

Spectrometers are used, like prisms, to spread light out into the component colours. This enables us to understand the compositions of everything from stars to streetlights. Here I show you how to make your own spectrometer and give you a few examples of what you can see with it.

Black Hole Hunter is an online game. This relates to a post of mine from last week about the sounds of gravity waves. If you like listening to white noise and looking at graphs then this is the game for you!

A nifty graphic showing the sizes of the planets, moons, comets, asteroids and plutoids in relative font sizes. Best viewed very large!

Wordle is a website that lets you create word clouds of text. I have been playing with astronomy and astrophysics text to see what comes out the other end. Some of them are very pretty!

August 1st 2008 will see a solar eclipse visible across much of Asia, Europe, the Middle East and some portions of North America. The eclipse is often being called the 2008 Olympic Eclipse because it comes just days before the commencement of the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Gravity waves can be interpreted as sounds. Here are some of the gravity-sounds that would be made by black holes, pulsars and other massive objects.

Another physics experiment you can perform in your kitchen. This time let’s crush a can using just pressure. We will create a vacuum and then see how powerful air pressure can be. Oh and we crush things!

Here is a great astronomy website for some fun this weekend called Down2Earth. You input some parameters and then simulate an asteroid impact on Earth. You can select the asteroid’s size, speed, density and target material. Try it out! (Screenshots inside).

I am running a conference in September and I’m inviting astronomers and astronomy bloggers from anywhere! If you’re interested in how astronomy and the internet can combine to produce new and interesting tools for research and communication then this conference is for you.

May 22nd and 23rd will be providing some excellent opportunities for seeing the International Space Station from Europe and North America. The details of each sighting vary from place to place, but it is safe to say that the two days and nights will be offering some of the best sightings for a long time!

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.

China’s Fengyun 1C satellite, which was destroyed intentionally by China last year, still presents a risk to satellites and other orbiting bodies. I have created a Google Earth file which will let you track the debris in real-time.

I have updated and fixed the files for tracking satellites and the ISS on Google Earth. You are no longer offered driving directions to the satellites either.

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…

I’ve been wishing there was a wavelength slider in Google Sky ever since it launched and so I have tried to make one. Well I’ve started to make one and thought I’d share. In place of an actual wavelength slider, I have hijacked the time slider and so each wavelength…

With the recent news that we will beaming the Beatles to Polaris, I got to thinking about good songs that are space related. Here’s what I came up with:

• Science Fiction Double Feature from the Rocky Horror Picture Show [Amazon]
• Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft by The Carpenters [Amazon] [iTunes]
• Space Truckin’ by Deep…

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, what…

Stuart (Astronomy Blog) has been busy working on the telescope XML that has been discussed before. Well he has actually posted some working feeds in what he called STML (see post title).

In response I’ve tried to create Google Sky equivalent KML files. These just read in the STML feeds and put…

Here’s a cool thing: I now have a picture of my retinas. Below you can see both my eyes (left then right in case you were wondering) in full colour, as photographed by my optician. Whilst explaining to me what I was looking at, she also told me something I…

The Over Cardiff and related Twitter feeds should now only issue warnings when the weather is fine. This has been achieved using Yahoo! Weather’s RSS API, which returns the weather for each location when the script checks for visible ISS passes.

In case you don’t know, Over Cardiff is one of…

I have been playing with Google Sky recently. As a sort of case-study, I made for myself a little script that overlays data from NASA’s SkyView website onto Google Sky. If you don’t know, SkyView dubs itself a ‘virtual telescope’. Essentially its a way to look up regions of the sky…

I finally caught the Space Station in Cardiff last night.

Having rained on me all day, it finally cleared up and was almost cloudless at both times for the ISS going over. Caught a few crappy photos, one of which is right here. You can see the ISS as a little…