I picked this up from Emily Lakdawalla and think it’s just too cool: Astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, on International Space Station mission 28 and 29, takes advantage of the microgravity environment to play a Bugs Bunny style game of solo baseball – pitch, then outrun the ball, pick up a bat, strike, and then race the ball again to catch it. Great fun!
Continue reading →Some time ago, we featured a poster created by the Planerary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla which showed all of the Sun’s largest satellites (or at least, everything we know of that’s bigger than 400km across), to scale. She has since refined the image to correct perspective effects that made Saturn look bigger than Jupiter, and you can see the result to the right. Gas giants, rocky planets, minor planets, asteroids, moons, they’re all there. Click the image to see it in … Continue reading →
Spiral patterns are a common site throughout the natural world, but in the cosmos we usually associate them with galaxies. But now it appears that young stars, still forming their dust disks into planets, may have spiral arms as well. Astronomers studying a previously known disk around the star SAO 206462 were surprised to see that the dust had been swept into an unmistakable spiral arm pattern. SAO 206462 is a well studied system, as it is a young star … Continue reading →
Some of the space debris currently being tracked. Credit: NASA As you surely know by now, the space close to Earth is becoming more and more crowded with defunct satellites, dropped tools, discarded booster rockets and general man-made bric-a-brac. All of this stuff is in orbit around the planet, at varying altitudes and in variously shaped orbits. And to make it especially dangerous, it’s zipping around at speeds measured in tens of thousands of kilometers per hour – objects ranging … Continue reading →
Dear Urban Astronomer Can you tell me what is on the photos? I captured this Sunday night in Harrismith. I saw five of these fireballs between 22h00 and 22h22 moving from North to South. Thank you Riaan van Greuning After a brief conversation with Riaan, I realised he’d seen something quite spectacular which couldn’t be explained with any of my usual answers. Read the full article to find out what it was: Fireballs over Harrismith
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