We are living in exciting times! The search for planets outside of the solar system has been heating up considerably over the last few years and we have now hundreds of planets in our maps in a slowly expanding sphere of several hundred light years from earth. However due to the current detection systems, our [...]
This picture is already two years old, but I just recently found that page and thought I share… Here we have a photo taken of all of us by the HiRISE camera on board of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – at the time Mars was about 142 million kilometers from Earth, which is comparatively close [...]
Just found this via the always great Bad Astronomy blog: You have to click through for the larger version! What you see here is the result of dust devils removing the red surface dust in graceful arcs, with the grey sand in this particular crater on Mars shining through. Now how cool is that? Of [...]
It is very satisfying to finally see something that really, really belongs into the 21st century. If you haven’t followed the developments at the International Space Station lately, here are a couple of things to meditate over: There are currently four spacecraft docked at the ISS: Three Russian Soyuz and a Japanese resupply vehicle. The [...]
Every now and then it is worth to sit back and remember what a beautiful planet we are living on. This photo was taken at the end of July by a new weather satellite, GOES14, in a geostationary orbit at a distance of 36000 kilometers. You have to click through to see the breathtaking large [...]
It looks like there is a whole subcategory of videos on YouTube where users attempt to show our universe to scale. That’s actually not half as easy as one would first assume, since the size differences between us, our planet, other planets and the stars and galaxies are quite ridiculous. Here is a very well [...]
I’m currently glued to NASA TV’s YouTube channel, with its daily dosage of videos from the Hubble repair mission in glorious HD. It’s quite astonishing to think that the Hubble telescope has been in orbit now for 19 years – I was in university when Hubble was launched into space! It’s been out there, faithfully [...]
I’ve been gone for quite a while from this blog… it’s been a busy few months! To restart the blog, here first something geeky: 25 Microchips that Shook the World. A great article with short histories of 25 chips that had wide-ranging influence on… really, everything. Between them, there is no part of modern human [...]
Whenever I think I have too many too complicated projects I find something like this on the web… here is the Toaster Project. Thomas Thwaites is attempting to build a toaster from scratch, starting with iron ore, crude oil and other raw materials. It’s an interesting project, based on some very interesting and deep thoughts [...]
Another post about my geeky childhood follows… Maybe two years before I bought my first computer I read one of those “Science for 12-year olds” compilations with short illustrated essays about everything a boy in his early teens should be interested in – space rockets, lasers, radios, racing cars… One of the articles in the [...]