Category Archives: News and Updates

News about Astronomy and Space Science. Find every news item and update here, in blog format. You can get these updates sent straight to your mailbox by subscribing here, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking the link.

Cassini Probe to photograph Earth

Urban Astronomer avatarPosted on by

On 19 July 2013, the marvelous Cassini spacecraft will pause in its complicated orbital dance with Saturn and his moons to take an image of Earth silhouetted through the rings with it’s most high resolution camera.  Reminiscent of Voyager 1’s iconic 1990 image “Pale Blue Dot”, the picture will show a pixel-sized Earth in natural colour to give a realistic view of how our home planet looks from over 1.4 billion kilometers away. Unusually, there doesn’t seem to be any specific … Continue reading →

Carnival of Space #306

Urban Astronomer avatarPosted on by

Well it’s been a long time coming, but Urban Astronomer is finally hosting a Carnival of Space.  This will be the 306th Carnival and for anybody who’s gotten this far without knowing what a Carnival of Space is, it’s a weekly collection of the most interesting news from around the web on space science and astronomy.  Compilation follows:   At the top of the list is long-time home of the Carnival, Universe Today with news about observations of Asteroid 1998 … Continue reading →

Cosmoquest 32 hour Hangout-a-thon

Urban Astronomer avatarPosted on by

Here at Urban Astronomer, we’re big fans of Cosmoquest.  They do great work at the interface between professional science and the general public, taking care of both outreach and citizen science projects.  One day when I’m all grown up, I hope to work more closely with them.  On a personal note, I once commented on one of their blog posts and in response got a goodybag of NASA material and a handwritten note from project director Pamela Gay in the … Continue reading →

MOND theory gets a boost

Urban Astronomer avatarPosted on by

One of the stranger concepts in modern astronomy is Dark Matter.  Developed to explain certain discrepancies in the motions of stars within galaxies, it says that there must be a significant mass of material distributed widely through and around galaxies which we cannot detect from here on Earth – it’s “dark”.  There is another theory, though, called Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND).  The idea is that Newton’s laws of gravity, accurate and reliable as they are, are only useable within a … Continue reading →

New Australian Radio Telescope

Urban Astronomer avatarPosted on by

A new radio telescope in Western Australia’s remote outback promises to save the world billions of dollars by providing early warning of solar storms.  The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio telescope, built as a Square Kilometer Array precursor project and unveiled late last year, has stared monitoring the Sun just in time for the current solar maximum.  Severe storms can damage power transmission systems and destroy the delicate electronics in expensive satellites if their operators aren’t given enough time to … Continue reading →