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 [...]

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 [...]

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) [...]

Here are summaries of a few brief stories that combine Earth data and elsewhere data to get neat understandings of other worlds
1) Carrizozo Lava Flow (image: Google): Looking at Mars, we keep finding beautify lava flows that stream across the surface and end in sprawling lobes. Pouring over images of the Earth, we find [...]

When someone feels comfortable making such a pointed statement in their openning remarks, I just have to quote them and blog them.
In this talk on mars historic river systems, Ted Maxwell presented a visually stunning story rich with labeled MOC images. This is a bloggers dream come true - I can actually find what he [...]

We hit the last day of the meeting and I have something like 20 pages of notes to turn into blog posts. Unlike at astronomy meetings, I can’t write the blog post while listening to a lot of the talks. I’m taking notes, poring through imagery, and then googling the occasional geophysical term that I [...]

One of the themes that constantly crops up in papers on Mars is water. Did it exist? If it did, is it responsible or is something else responsible for the gullies, deltas, valleys, and other features that look like (and are thus named like) formations here on Earth.
One of the more often argued over structures [...]

This subject is best described in one word: Pretty.
Case in Point (from HiRISE):

Scientifically, that one word explanation and picture, however, really don’t quite cut it. Nonetheless, the session started with a pretty picture show. I’m kind of frustrated because the best image that was shown wasn’t captioned and I can’t find it. I’ll share with [...]

This morning I’m sitting in a session titled, “Lunar geophysics.” A more accurate might have been, “Lunar Magnetic Fields.” So far the dominant theme has been trying to determine if the moon once had a nature magnetic field driven by a lunar dynamo, or if all magnetic fields fields found on the moon were induced [...]