This is a funny way to start my reporting from the American Astronomical Society here in St. Louis, but news waits for no one!
1) First, a favor: if you participated in the online workshop on Sunday — even if you just watched the video stream — then we’re asking that you take just a minute [...]

This will be my last post from the actual physical location of the American Astronomical Society meeting; I’ve preloaded this entry to go up when I’ll be on a plane winging it back to Boulder. I’ll have some wrap-up stuff later (oh, just you wait) but since I’m heading back, I want to leave you [...]

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When I worked on Hubble data, lo these many years ago, some of the most fun [...]

Fraser, Pamela and I have been whining remarking to each other that there is a huge amount of news coming from this meeting, and we’re having a heckuva time keeping up. Some is worth a long writeup, while others can probably be handled with a short post. Below are a few of the stories that [...]

Yeah, you know Travis Rector: he makes pretty pictures. In fact, in my opinion, he made the prettiest picture of 2007! He also put together the image of Jupiter you see here.
He is a master of astronomical photography, and has the very enviable job of taking images off of various professional telescopes and creating [...]

A few months back, I blogged about GalaxyZoo, a very cool project that lets anyone classify galaxies from a professional astronomical survey of the sky. They got thousands of people helping, and have classified a million galaxies.
Wow.
But they had a problem: people were finding significantly more counterclockwise-rotating spiral galaxies than clockwise. That’s a problem! [...]

Space is a dangerous place. Stars explode, black holes gobble up matter… but some violent events are so huge they affect entire galaxies, mayhem on a scale so vast it numbs the mind.
Galaxies are island universes, cities of billions or even hundreds of billions of stars. Some galaxies, like our Milky Way, live pretty much [...]

The picture above shows a cosmic bulls-eye of epic alignment. But before I can tell you about it, I have to tell you about how the dart got thrown.
One of the more amazing aspects of looking into deep, deep space is that the path there is tortured and twisted. Space itself can be distorted by [...]

I forgot to bring my camera cable with me to the press room yesterday, so I wasn’t able to download pictures from camera until today (&^#%$&$ proprietary cables!). But I grabbed a few and uploaded them to my Flickr account, where they are in the AAS 2008 set. As of right now there are only [...]

Are there massive black holes screaming around just outside our Galaxy?
A new study says: Maybe.
Globular clusters are roughly spherical clusters of stars, some with populations numbering in the millions. They’re old, as old as the Galaxy, which means they’ve been around billions of years. There are no young stars in globular clusters, which means there [...]