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.

Earth from Orbit – video

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If you point your browser to The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, you will find a complete collecton of images of Earth taken by astronauts in space.  James Drake is a science educator with a good eye for spectacular scientific imagery, and has made good use of that site.  He has stitched together 600 photographs of Earth taken from the International Space Station to create the timelapse video on the left.  The camera is set up for night-time photography, … Continue reading →

Vesta shape model – video

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The Dawn mission is equipped with cameras built and operated by the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt  (DLR, or the German Aerospace Company), which are working overtime to collect as much data about Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the Solar System.  They have recently completed processing the footage received so far to build a shape map of the asteroid, which is a crucial tool to understand the morphology of Vesta. Vesta has a very complex shape – more … Continue reading →

Photographed: Apollo landing sites

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Apollo 17 landing site imaged by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/ASU A few months back, while debating the moon landing hoax with a relative, I was asked “Why don’t they just prove it by pointing a telescope at the moon and showing us the landing site?”.  I tried to explain how even the most powerful telescopes ever built could not resolve something the size of a car from 350,000 km away, and especially not while looking … Continue reading →

Mining Weekly interviews SASRA president

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As we’ve mentioned before, the South African Space Resources Association (SASRA) is a body dedicated to bringing South African mining and engineering experience into the field of space resource utilisation.  If humankind is ever to leave the cradle, we must learn to gather resources from the moon, asteroids, and planets.  South Africa probably has more expertise and experience in mining under extreme conditions than any other country in the world, so we have a lot to offer. There are increasing … Continue reading →

MNASSA available online

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ASSA have recently launched the new web-page for their bimonthly publication, the inaccurately named Monthly Notes of the Astronomical Society of South Africa (MNASSA).  As part of the changes voted in at the last AGM, ASSA has stopped producing print copies of the Monthly Notes, and now publishes them as pdf files, to be stored on the MNASSA website.  As a bonus, this means that members will no longer lose their copies in the mail, and non-members will not need … Continue reading →