I've always been a big fan of astronomy. One reason is that I love being exposed to new, novel concepts, and the universe is big enough that we are continually coming across new things we've never seen before and don't know how to explain. One such example is V838 Monocerotis, a star in our own galaxy. Three years ago, it suddenly became the brightest star in the Milky Way, and then quickly faded again. While it's certainly perplexing trying to figure out what caused its strange behavior, the part I find cool is the interesting image of the star captured by the Hubble telescope.

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A few years ago I read Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History Of Time, and found it very interesting. Aside from describing the current theories regarding the formation of the universe, it provided a clear summary of the development of science and astronomy in the time of Kepler, Newton, etc.

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I love how NASA tends to release full-resolution versions of all of their images. I guess when the government is paying for your bandwidth, you can afford to do that kind of thing. Here's a particularly cool shot from the current shuttle mission. The link goes to the full-res, 3mb image on NASA's servers. In case the URL changes or the image is taken down, I saved a smaller version on my own server here (470kb).

I read with relief today that we've returned to space. Let's hope this and the next few shuttle missions go well, so that they can then tackle the decision about whether or not to deorbit the Hubble. If we run into more trouble with the shuttle, then repairing the Hubble obviously won't even be an option. I'm hoping they choose to repair it, of course. How else will we be able to keep an eye on the Dark Lord Sauron?

Think what it'd be like to live on Saturn, where the rings often cast their own shadows on the surface of the planet. What an interesting dynamic it'd be, to have the day go dim and look up to see the sunlight filtering through those impressive rings. Of course, when you imagine this, I guess you also have to imagine that Saturn actually has a solid surface, instead of just being a big ball of gas.

To celebrate the 35th anniversary of the landing on the Moon, NASA has taken all of the film taken during the Apollo space program out of the freezer, thawed them out and scanned them at high resolution. Awesome. Some of my favorites:

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