If you’re sad about the administration’s desire to scrap our return to the moon, you might want to be at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Centerin Concord later this month for International Observe the Moon Night, a NASA-sponsored lunar lovefest.
Harlan Spence, lunar specialist and director of Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and [...]

UPDATE: Cloudy all night, saw nothing … but at least it rained a little bit.
I got a day ahead of myself this week, so let me repeat this item:
Tonight (Thursday night) there’s another chance for a night-sky display: the Perseid meteor shower should peak, and there’s almost no moon to blot it out. Some [...]

After a bone-dry summer, cloudy thunderstorms have moved in and blocked the sky on both of the recent nights when Northern Lights were possible, including last night. Argh!
Tonight (Thursday night) there’s another chance for a night-sky display: the Perseid meteor shower should peak, and there’s almost no moon to blot it out. Some reports say [...]

UPDATE: It was clouded over - didn’t see a thing. ARGH! And we didn’t even get much rain out of it, just a sprinkle; and boy, do we need rain.

One of the regrets of my life is that I’ve never seen the Northern Lights. Tonight (Tuesday, Aug. 3) might change that: A massive solar storm [...]

Neil Armstrong has never been very comfortable with his first-man-on-moon celebrity, so it was a surprise when an NH auction house put up a signature of his for sale. Turns out, as this story notes, the signature was swiped from a customs declaration form.  From the story:
Armstrong stopped signing items in 1994, greatly increasing [...]

Here’s a pretty funny lead: The eastern United States is broiling in a dangerous heat wave. Yet this week Earth is farther away from the sun than the planet will be at any other time during 2010. How can that be?
Fortunately, that beginning for this National Geographic article is tongue-in-cheek, and uses the heat wave [...]

I missed World UFO Day, as I learned about from this NY Times story, which notes:
World U.F.O. Day is celebrated by some on June 24, to commemorate the first widely reported U.F.O. sighting by Kenneth Arnold, a pilot who claimed to see what he would call “flying saucers” over Mount Rainier the same [...]

Today’s the longest amount of daylight of the year, but as I have noted many times in the past, it’s not the day with the earliest sunrise (that was last week) or latest sunset (that’s next week). This Web site can give you those figures.
This counter-intuitive result is due to the oddities of our orbit, [...]

NASA has launched - ha! get it? - a pretty cool Web site explaining the history of space suits. Here it is. I enjoyed the way it mixes old and sort-of-new animation: The site is introduced by a talking avatar - albeit not the most up-to-date; it moves more like someone from Syberia, a 2002 [...]

Newspaper people hate group photos. We get them submitted all the time, showing a whole bunch of people who participated in some event standing stiffly side by side; next to the posed check-passing photo, it’s our least favorite cliche picture.

But every rule has an exception, so I had to run the above picture, showing the roughly 150 people invited by NASA, via a Tweet-up, to watch the launch of the Atlantis space shuttle. Nashua resident Aaron Cunningham, who I wrote about last week, sent it; he is somewhere in that teeming mob.

The fun part, of course, is the launch countdown clock beside them. Holy toledo, that’s a big, big clock.

The Globe has a photo display of vintage travel posters, regarding a show at the Boston Public Library. They’re very cool posters, including Art Deco-ish items about the old ski train from Boston up to N.H., but the attached poster is definitely my favorite: A special train to see the 1932 solar eclipse that slashed right through New England!

I was lucky enough to see a total solar eclipse in Tennessee, 25 or so years ago. It was, to coin a phrase, wicked awesome.

I’ve got a piece in the Telegraph today (here it is) about a local guy who’s going down to Kennedy Space Center to get a close-up view of the next shuttle launch as part of a NASA ‘tweet-up’. He’s a Twitter follower of NASA who applied for one of 150 spots and was picked.

I had a free afternoon in Tucson, Arizona, this weekend, and faced a choice: I had time to visit either the Kitt Peak National Observatory, one of the nations’ great research sites for astronomical viewing, or the Titan Missile Museum, the only remaining launch sile (with missile) of a Titan II nuclear missile from Soviet [...]

The Hubble Telescope turns 20 years old tomorrow.
It’s produced amazing pictures over the years, but in its early years it was best known for a faulty lens that needed to be fixed.
What’s forgotten is that several more servicing missions followed that first servicing mission to fix that initial lens problem.
The fourth mission was STS-109, in [...]

From UNH news service: Frank Wilczek, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 2004 Nobel Laureate, will discuss “the new space, how we got to it, and where it points” at the University of New Hampshire in Durham on Thursday, April 29, 2010, at 4 p.m. in the [...]