#Astronomy

You kinda have to love this sort of creative interactivity. Lurv.

Solar Beat

Very music of the spheres-esque.

Watch this. It’s worth it. Listen to the Sagan.

Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings; thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines; every hunter and forager; every hero and coward; every creator and destroyer of civilizations; every king and peasant, every young couple in love; every mother and father; hopeful child; inventor and explorer; every teacher of morals; every corrupt politician; every supreme leader; every superstar; every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

This is unfathomably amazing. A digital map of our known universe by the American Museum of Natural History going all the way from the Himalayas to the edge of our senses and the afterglow of the Big Bang. Humbling hugeness.

If you’ve got a really big screen I recommend going to the AMNH YouTube site and watching this in hidef. It’s incredible on my cinema display.

I don’t know why I find all the news on exoplanets so geekily fascinating. Something about the idea of jumping to a different world to explore. Hmmm… Must be the sci-fi geek in me. I am anxiously awaiting the first near-Earth they find though. How long do you think ? One year ? Three ?

Sultry World Found Circling the Star GJ 1214

I still think one of the cool things about this one is that it’s close enough that signals from the Earth have already passed it.

Utterly brilliant. The mad scientists at Toshiba attached 8 HD cameras to an armchair and weather balloon and launched them to the edge of space.

Stunning visuals of our tiny little fragile beautiful planet. Wow. Wait for the balloon pop at the end.

So makes me want to go into space to see the curve of the planet.

OK, very geeky, but believe it or not, I almost once went down this path and was supposed to be at university originally studying astrophysics and the nature of reality. Still not sure what happened. Ok, well there was that blonde girl that distracted me, but…

Love this summary of seven questions that keep physicists up at night .

Those of you who know something of my checkered backstory know I actually started off University in astrophysics. I still carry that sense of wonder about the universe and its secrets with me and am always floored about what we learn about the world beyond our backyard. Hubble’s 3D model of the red shifted data from the Hubble Ultra Deep field:

Personally, just waiting for warp drive and transporters myself… and that big screen TV on the bridge.

Back in the day when I first got to Uni, the plan was to be an astrophysicist. I saw NASA as a viable career choice. Academia wasn’t enough like Star Trek that it could hold me long, but I still get a vicarious thrill from watching space exploration and dreaming of alien worlds to explore one day.

The Phoenix Lander is just getting to Mars today and starting its descent. But the red planet has managed to take out as many probes as have made it to the surface of the planet, so the outcome is far from certain.