Looking quite regal on Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39A, Discovery gets lit up by powerful xenon lamps in this animation made from live video feed images taken on the night before her final launch. As of this writing the shuttle liftoff is on schedule for 4:50pm EST on Thursday, February 24. The images above were…
Category: News
Tyche: Have We Marked the Spot of Planet X?
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the existence of a “new” planet in our solar system, a gas giant that has eluded discovery by astronomers thus far because of its purported incredibly distant orbit – over 350 times farther from the Sun than Pluto, or a whopping 15,000 times farther from the Sun…
New Images of Tempel 1!
This just in! Cropped and sharpened via high pass slightly by yours truly. More to come! ADDED: Here’s another! Nice lighting here! (I removed some motion blur from this one via Photoshop.) And another (nice resolution here): See more images on the Stardust mission page here. Remember….they’re looking for whatever did this. Could it be…
Kepler’s Discovery: New Worlds for the Finding
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Today NASA held a press conference at 1pm EST to present the discovery of over 1,200 exoplanet candidates by the Kepler telescope, an orbiting space observatory that’s been watching a section of the sky near the constellation Cygnus for the past year and a half. (The spacecraft launched…
The Search for Alien Earths
Can’t view the video below? Click here. Fifteen years ago we didn’t even know there were other solar systems. Now there’s been over 500 planets discovered orbiting other stars in our galaxy, with new ones added to the list almost weekly. Scientists using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, NASA’s orbiting Kepler spacecraft and other telescopes…
WordPress Posting Challenge
Ok, it’s not really a challenge for me because I post an awful lot of things here on Lights in the Dark, but I think it’s great that WordPress is putting forth the effort to get more of their bloggers….well, blogging, with their Post Every Day Challenge. It’s an attempt to get people writing, regardless…
2010 in Review
I got my new WordPress report card for 2010…the results are below. Not sure if they grade on a curve but I would say I got at least a solid “B+”. 🙂 _______________ The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its…
Visiting a Comet
They’re calling it a “peanut with jets”…Comet Hartley 2, discovered 26 years ago by astronomer Malcolm Hartley, received a brief but fascinating visit today by NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft at 10:01 am EDT. Images were received on Earth half an hour later, and I assembled these initial 5 close-ups into the rough animation above. (Click to…
This Week in Space
Episode 24. Includes: Cool video of new space vehicle tests, Daily Show on NASA boss Charlie Bolden’s Muslim comment, Space Shuttle worker layoffs, last Atlantis shuttle fuel tank, progress we have a problem, and asteroid ready for close up. Provided by SpaceflightNow.com. Can’t view the video above? Watch on YouTube here.
Lutetia in the Limelight
On the night of Saturday, July 10, 2010, ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft passed by the 80-plus-mile-wide asteroid Lutetia at a distance of less than 2000 miles, and retured a series of wonderfully detailed images of this intriguing little member of our solar system. The image above, cropped and rotated 90º, shows Lutetia’s cratered surface, covered with…
This Week in Space
Season 1, episode 23: SpaceX issues a financial challenge to the big space contractors, last shuttle launches slip, video diary from Mars 500 crew, IKAROS’ successful solar sail, kids discover Martian cave, John Glenn joins the save shuttle fray, Cassini takes a dip in Titan’s atmosphere, new Hubble images show star formation, extreme exoplanet weather,…
This Week in Space
Season 1, episode 22: Miles is back this week with a new way to track world shipping, Soyuz launch to ISS, former NASA admin Griffin has kind words about SpaceX’s Elon Musk, the results are in from Kepler’s first days of planet hunting, men locked up for 17 months to simulate Mars mission and a…
Lights in the Dark 