Networking Meteors
May 11I don't normally talk about the daily APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) images from NASA becasue they are so popular and well annotated. Today's has really caught my eye though. Between 2007 and 2009, a group of amateur meteor enthusiasts in Japan got together to create a national network of over 100 connected video cameras. They used a piece of motion-detection software called...
Digging APOD
Mar 14
Listen, I love APOD but I am a bit fed up of everyone on Digg filling up the digg/space category with endless APOD images. They're very pretty, and we all like them, but how am I supposed to know when a really amazing one comes up if you all digg every single one? Also the presence of APOD on digg is shifting other, more worthy and original stories off of my RSS feed. APOD does carry some...
Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of the Day (APOD)
Aug 29
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 Top Ten but they represent some of the best things about the APOD site as well as being some of the most impressive images. 10: Mars Then and...
A Solar Eclipse From Above
Jun 13
This image appeared on APOD the other day. It shows a solar eclipse as viewed from space. Very cool. This image was taken from the old MIR station during the August 11th 1999 eclipse which was, if you can remember, visible from the UK. In fact if you look very closely you might be able to see me sitting on a ship in the English Channel. Oh wait, no you won't because it was cloudy. As you can...
The Windmills of Your Mind
May 23
A recent Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is shown above. The point was to illustrate that star trails really are evidence of our rotation as a planet. Are photographs of star trails really evidence of the Earth's rotation about its axis? Yes they are, and science journalist Trudy E. Bell discovered that there is a simple way to demonstrate this, if you have the stomach for it. Trudy Bell...
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