The Bad Astronomer talks about the bow shock around Betelgeuse (I have to pick up his new book, Death from the Skies!. Any book that uses an exclamation point in the title...)

To give this a SF twist, look up Gregory Benford's short story Bow Shock, which appeared in the first issue of Jim Baen's Universe. Why this story did not win a Hugo or a Nebula, I'll never know.

From direct images of exo-planets to stuff like this, it's amazing how astronomy keeps coming up with stuff that...well, amazes! "What a fascinating modern age we live in", as Captain J. Aubrey put it.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:41 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Harrison H. "Jack" Schmitt, the only geologist to walk on the Moon, has resigned from The Planetary Society.

Finally, becoming a deep space-faring nation again constitutes a mult-generational endeavor, particularly if Mars is in the mix. Unfortunately, the government-run, politicized K-12 school system will not currently support such an endeavor. It has totally failed several generations of young people, not just in STEM subjects but in history, language and economics. This problem has to be solved first. The people requirements for a return to the Moon should help jump start that process, although it will take a much more grassroots effort to be successful.

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 12:55 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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One of my most treasured astronomy books is a massive NASA-published collection of pictures from the 1960's-era Lunar Orbiter series of probes. You can get a copy online, if you search, but if you want a "deadtree" edition, be prepared to get another mortgage out.

So it was pretty amazing to see that the data from these probes is still of use: it is being reprocessed to get more detail and will help out our future unmanned and (the new administration willing) manned missions to our nearest neighbor.

I really hope that they reprocess the image known as The Picture of the Century (download the 9.8MB version for a real "wow!). That is my all-time favorite.

(Some details here.)

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 07:09 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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An article looking at the hoops one has to jump through in order to do experiments at home. Have you looked at a kid's chemistry set recently? Trash!

Posted by: Fred Kiesche at 08:52 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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