Remember this picture? To my mind this is one of the most amazing images in the history of planetary exploration. It shows the Mars Phoenix lander descending under a parachute to the surface of Mars in 2008, and was taken from orbit by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The lander is actually much closer to the [...]
NASA and JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) released this new video to explain the unbelievably complicated procedures by which they hope to land the Curiosity rover on Mars: Why so complicated? My favorite blogger Emily Lakdawalla begins a multi-part series today, promising to explain this in great detail. There is no better person out there to [...]
One of the great lessons of astronomy is that appearances can be deceiving—things are not always what they seem to be. What appear to be pin pricks of light too dim to see in the daytime are in fact enormous nuclear furnaces hundreds of time more luminous than our sun. The sun is a rather [...]
(This post has been edited slightly from the original to include the MESSENGER mission to Mercury and to correct a misstatement about galactic black holes.) As the end of calendar year 2011 approaches, I thought my readers might enjoy a look back at some of the key events of the year in astronomy. The usual caveats [...]
One of the more pleasing aspects of astronomy is the extent to which it is utterly predictable. The North Star will never appear in the southern sky, the Southern Cross will never be visible from Virginia, and if Orion is high in the southern sky at midnight, it must be December. And yet it is [...]
