I’d like to hear your thoughts on the things you like and dislike about Orbiting Frog and any changes or modifications you’d like to see. This could include anything from the way the blog looks and feels to the topics covered or the regularity of updates.

Tonight: Mars and Regulus are the same distance apart as the twin sof the twinstars Castor and Pollux, 4.5°. Look for Castor and Pollux very low in the northwest at dusk. Mars and Regulus are far to the upper left of the twins, about 3 and a half fists.

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The powers that be have decreed that some ereas of physic are more equal than others. The BBC has a good summary.

Astronaut Ron Garan works on assigned tasks during the last scheduled spacewalk of the STS-124 mission specialist. A great photo of one of Colbert’s heroes at work.

I love that this happened just down the road from where I live. Police called out to a 999 call about an unexplained object in the night sky solved the mystery straight away for their when they realised it was actually the Moon. Well worth listening to.

Mang is hosting his first Carnival of Space this week. I’d like to highlight a couple of articles from the list here, too.

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.

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.

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

We did a cool experiment last Wednesday about the UV properties of various liquids. It yielded this very cool picture which looks like something from science fiction.