Every once in a while, statistically detected once a day or so, a GIANT star explodes as a hypernova (an over grown supernova) and channels its energy straight at us. This energy is mostly contained in an insanely powerful beam of gamma rays. That said, they also give off X-Ray and Optical light, and by […]

The word Novae generally refers to a “New Star,” or a “Guest Star” - An object that springs up in the sky quite suddenly as a new but non-permanent object. Today we give these non permanent sky features a dozen or more names: Supernovae (types I & II with all sorts of extra letters), Recurrent […]

One of the hardest things you can observationally do in astronomy is spectroscopy. You have to guide really well to keep the light on the slit. You have to calibrate the sensitivity across you chip (flat fielding like you do in imaging), the sensitivity as a function of wavelength (using a hot standard star as […]

As well as blogging this meeting as best I can, I’m also here try very hard to suck as many people into communicating astronomy as I can. To that end, I gave a talk on a project to create a Speaker’s Bureau, a Writer’s Bureau and an archive of publicly available presentations. Led by Mike […]

Variable stars come in many forms - there are happy little regular stars, widely separated and merrily circling ones dancing an eon long dance. Some white dwarfs - dead stars, cooling into stellar embers of stars - become vampires as they gravitationally suck mass from their companion and heat themselves back out of the stellar […]

So, if you’re like, you may not own a telescope (story later, because I know you’ll ask). Like me, you may love looking through telescopes, taking images through telescopes, and just being able to intellectually get your hands dirty doing observational astronomy. If you are like me, you just can’t quite afford the scope you […]

After several days of travel, I’ve settled into the front row of the BAA/AAVSO meeting in New Hall, in Cambridge, UK. Dr. Paula Skody is giving an excellent talk on pro-am collaboration to make Hubble Space Telescope observations of cataclysmic variables. She studies pulsating white dwarfs - stars whose outer 99% have oscillations that […]

Not My Rovers ! 
  Sadly I must report that it appears the Mars Rovers will lose nearly 4 million dollars from its 20 million dollar budget.  Next year they are expected to take a further cut of nearly 8 millions dollars.  Worse off the funding cuts are likely to place Spirit on hibernation and job cuts […]

The following interview is from what was by far the funniest poster I’ve ever seen that was legitimate.
[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/starstryder/StarStryder-080311-DustCotton.mp3]
Here is a link to her science: Paper

While at LPSC I had the delightful experience of randomly stumbling across someone I could have been. There was this young woman - a first year college student who was a sophmore my credits (just like I was) - who was wearing a Space Academy Lanyard (I’m sure I have one in a box somewhere) […]