The HiRISE camera onboard MRO just took this phenomenal picture of one of the moons of Mars, Deimos: That is so cool! Deimos is the smaller of the two moons, a lumpy ball 15 x 12 x 10 km in size (Phobos is 27 x 22 x 18). Deimos has incredibly weak gravity; its escape velocity is only about 20 km/hr,...

The folks working with the fantabulous Cassini Saturn probe just released a very cool image indicating a very cool discovery: a moonlet embedded in Saturn’s G ring. Saturn’s G ring is the second outermost ring (one more ring, E, is outside G, but very wide and diffuse). It’s about ...

The European Southern Observatory just released a whoppingly cool picture: Whoa. That’s the Carina nebulosity region, a vast complex of stars, gas, and dust in the southern skies, one of if not the largest star-forming regions in the galaxy. This shows only a piece of it 144 light years across...

We're (finally, thankfully) in a cold, wet winter weather pattern.  Over the past four days we've received about 3.5 inches of rain, and it appears that we have Pacific storms dropping down out of Alaska every other day for the next ten days or so.  That's great.  We...

[Edited to add: If you like this article, please Digg it so others see it. Thanks!] Holy Haleakala! That’s NGC 4921, a face-on spiral galaxy in the Coma cluster of galaxies, over 300 million light years away. This Hubble image is a mosaic of 80 separate images, and has stunning clarity and dep...

On my way to the airport to head to Pasadena last Thursday, I was in a bit of a hurry. I left on time, but several delays (getting gas, putting oil in the car, forgetting my PIN at the bank, and a half dozen more assininities) had me about 15 minutes behind. I got on a side road with no traffic ligh...

Centaurus A is a nearby galaxy — at 13 million light years distant, only a handful of big galaxies are closer to us. And it’s weird: it’s an elliptical galaxy eating a spiral! They’re in the last stages of merging into one bigger and messier galaxy. Dust from the spiral forms...

HiRISE, the awesomely cool camera orbiting Mars, released this very interesting picture of a smallish impact crater on the planet: The crater is about 300 meters across (as usual, click the picture to embiggenatrize it), and is covered with boulders. That indicates it’s pretty fresh, because a...

Taking pictures of the sky is an amazingly fun thing to do. It’s not terribly hard to get decent shots of stars, and I’ve taken quite a few lovely pictures of planets and satellites myself with nothing more than a tripod and an off-the-shelf digital camera. If you have taken some good pi...

What can I say? My pans obviously enjoy getting washed. I’ve said before that the faces we see in random patterns are determined by our upbringing. Religiously devout people see Mary and Jesus and Mohammed. What do I see? Who ya gonna call?...