Why is my subject of research worthy of study? This is a question I am going to try and answer in the next week. The science of star formation is something which involves money, time and great effort. Is that expenditure by the taxpayer, the telescope operators and even the scientists and themselves worthwhile? I... Continue Reading →

The morning sun burns into the clouds…Originally uploaded by hole-in-one. 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 they seem. By that... Continue Reading →

Wired are reporting on a feasability study from the NASA Institute for Advanced Studies on a giant liquid mirror telescope that could potentially be placed on the Moon. Roger Angel or the University of Arizona is the man in charge of this study and he is suggestying it may be possible to build a 100m... Continue Reading →

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... Continue Reading →

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii has two new instruments called HARP and ACSIS.They work in conjunction and together they recently took measurements of the Orion Nebula and assocaited Giant Molecular Cloud (GMC). These new instruments, called “revolutionary” by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), record the internal motions of gas taking... Continue Reading →

ISSOriginally uploaded by jarguel. Haven’t seen much that I’ve liked in the Astrophotography group on Flickr lately but I went trawling earlier and found this lovely capture of the ISS from someone’s back garden. Thought it was worth sharing.

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 corner of Cetus, the constellation... Continue Reading →

Researchers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope used the infrared telescope to map temperature variations over the surface of a giant gas planet, HD 189733b, revealing it likely is whipped by roaring winds. Using the data they have created what they call the first weather map of an exoplanet. You can read more in their Letter... Continue Reading →

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 as these, although I feel... Continue Reading →