• Pic of the Week: Space Triangle

    This week’s image is from the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows the collision of spiral galaxy NGC 2445 on the right and NGC 2444 on the left, creating what appears to be a triangle of new stars. Here is a little more on the pair from NASA’s Hubblesite: A spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies…

  • The Future of Mauna Kea and its Telescopes

    Finding the right place to build a telescope is crucial in a time of growing cities and brighter skies, which is why the telescopes atop of Mauna Kean in Hawaii are a great resource. Is that about to change? It is not clear, but a Hawaiian State bill is attempting to transfer ownership of the…

  • What is the Galileo Project?

    After mentioning this organization in a previous post, I thought I would look a little further at its work. The Galileo Project was set up for one purpose: …to bring the search for extraterrestrial technological signatures of Extraterrestrial Technological Civilizations (ETCs) from accidental or anecdotal observations and legends to the mainstream of transparent, validated and…

  • Space Quote: Keeping an Open Mind

    “Human history is very often driven by a group of people feeling superior to another group of people. If we find that we are not the smartest kid on the cosmic block, it will give us a different perspective. All the differences between humans will become irrelevant.” -Harvard University Professor Avi Loeb quoted in the…

  • Cosmonauts Arrive at the International Space Station

    On Friday, a Soyuz space capsule arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) with three Russian cosmonauts –  Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev, and Sergey Korsakov. This will bring the ISS crew to 10. On March 30th, three crew members will return to the surface of the Earth – NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Russian cosmonauts Pyotr…

  • The Chairwoman of the UAE Space Agency and the Mission to Mars

    You may want to visit Time magazine and view the article “The Woman Who Took the UAE to Mars.” It summarizes Sarah Al Amiri’s efforts related to the United Arab Emirates’ mission to Mars as well as her plans for the country’s space agency, which she now heads as Chairwoman. Prior to becoming Chairwoman, Ms.…

  • A Day in Astronomy: Orbiting Mercury

    On this day in 2011, NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) probe became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. NASA prepared the 10-year summary below explaining MESSENGER’s accomplishments from the time it was launched on August 3, 2004 through August 1, 2014. The probe later impacted the surface of Mercury on April 30, 2015.…

  • Pic of the Week: Spanish Dancer Galaxy

    This week’s image, from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, is nicknamed the Spanish Dancer Galaxy. Here is a little more on from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab): Located in the constellation Dorado and lying around 70 million light-years away, NGC 1566 is a grand-design spiral galaxy with two arms that appear…

  • A Space Telescope Goes Dark

    You may have heard of Germany’s black hole-hunting telescope called the extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Arraye (eROSITA). It was launched in 2019 as part of a larger Russian-German mission called the “Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma” (SRG) observatory and placed in the L2 Lagrange Point. The eROSITA has three primary goals: to detect the hot intergalactic…

  • Exoplanet or Star?

    Phys.org had a good story on the reclassification of objects captured by the NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope once believed to be exoplanets. New evidence indicates three “exoplanets” – Kepler-854b, Kepler-840b, and Kepler-699b – are actually stars (hence, the NASA image above will need to be modified). The article notes that the three objects are too…