New content at GAS … Earthrise …

I’ve been a space geek ever since I was an 8 year old kid, and spent a summer inside glued to the TV watching the Apollo-Soyuz linkup in in July 1975. I’m a little too young to have watched any of the moon landings …

Dark matter or dark confusion?

Awhile back, I wrote a couple of posts about an interesting observation from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory that seemed to indicate the existence of dark matter. The picture to the left is a false colour image of a collision between galactic clusters. The pink regions show jets of super-heated gas shooting out from the clusters, while the blue regions show the gravitational “footprint” of the clusters as determined through the process of gravitational lensing …

50 years of space @ GeeksAreSexy.net

Today marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most significant events of the 20th century. Technology never exists in a vacuum … no matter what technical advancement we think of, there are always social, political, and ideological currents swirling around it as well as the technical currents …

The race to Mars

I’ve just added a new entry over at Geeks are Sexy, discussing the current climate surrounding a manned mission to Mars. I’ll post an excerpt below, and head on over to GAS to read the full text of the article.
It makes for very good science fiction. Mankind has been fascinated by the red planet [...]

The Grand Time Machine

One of the lesser understood concepts in astronomy for lay-people is the notion that we can never see what is happening in the universe right now. Instead, when we point a telescope sky-ward, we are looking back in time. Because light is a property in the physical universe, it moves at a finite speed … [...]

Onwards and downwards

Returning to space geek mode again, I wanted to draw everyone’s attention to a recent shot from Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD). The shot on the left is a composite image pieced together from pictures taken by the Martian rover Opportunity, looking down a slope into the base of Victoria Crater, the largest impact [...]

Mars will NOT look as big as the moon this month …

I haven’t actually received this email recently (though I have in the past), but I heard today that a local radio DJ got sucked in by the hoax and made an on-air announcement about it. He corrected himself in short order, but I thought in the interest of clarity and accuracy I’d make a debunking [...]

A new Canadian record

Canada isn’t usually the first country that pops to mind when people think of the international space program. Countries like the US, Russia, China, and even France and the EU tend to come up before Canada does. Without the fame of the Canadarm, the robotic arm that Canada designed for the Shuttle, and the new [...]

Wiki Sky

Anyone who follows this blog on even a casual basis has probably noticed that I’m a huge space geek. If it involves telescopes, or stars, or space ships, or exploring other planets, its endlessly fascinating to me, and I’ve probably written something about it in these pages somewhere along the way. I happen to think [...]

Prairie Cinema

Aurora Borealis from the Trans Canada Highway between Brooks and Medicine Hat, Alberta.  Click here for more of my flickr pics …