Astronomy

In this video I show how you can help the SETI Institute find extraterrestrial intelligence from home.

In this video I show how you can find potentially habitable exoplanets with a videogame, for free, and without the need of a telescope:

In this video I show you another way you can find potentially habitable exoplanets from home, for free, and without the need of a telescope.

In this video I show you how to find potentially habitable exoplanets from home, for free, and without the need of a telescope.

Were the moon landings faked? Was it all an elaborate hoax to beat the soviets in the space race? Was America lacking the technical ability to make it to the moon? What do you think?

Here is the list of the top 5 Things that you did not know about the planet you are currently living on. Unless of course you are watching this in the future from a survival camp on Mars!

There is many different types of stars in the universe. Majority of them are red dwarf stars. However, there are plenty of stars like ordinary stars (like our sun), red giants, blue stars and etc. Furthermore, when you look in the night sky, we see a lot of small and bright stars. What people don't know is that there are stars that are not even completely understood by astronomers and scientists.

Extraterrestrial life is life that does not originate from Earth. It is also called alien life, or, if it is a sentient and/or relatively complex individual, an "extraterrestrial" or "alien" (or, to avoid confusion with the legal sense of "alien," a "space alien"). These as yet hypothetical forms of life range from simple bacteria-like organisms to beings far more complex than humans. The possibility that viruses might exist extraterrestrially has also been proposed.

The International Space Station is a habitable man-made satellite currently in orbit around the Earth. Launched in 1998, the ISS is used mainly as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory where astronauts perform experiments in large variety of fields, including biology and physics.

There's nothing more inherently awesome than looking up into the stars and wondering WTF is really out there. Outer space is one of those rare items that a Google search cannot provide all of the answers for.

The Geminid meteor shower happens every December and has been observed for over 500 years. It's is also known as Winter's Fireworks because when viewed from the right location, there are enough meteors to light up the whole night sky, and some of them can even be different colors.

With the ever-evolving technology that imbues photography, we are never short of fantastic awe-inspiring shots. Digital cameras can capture things that the naked eye only wishes it could see, like streaking lights, rapid movements, and faraway objects, and it's fairly easy to capture these things if you know the basics.

There seems to be a renewed interest of late in the great beyond that is space. After the Red Bull Space Jump and the retirement of space shuttle Endeavor, space is kind of cool again.

Red Bull Stratos sent the first skydiver to space in a weather balloon this past weekend. Free-fall jumper Felix Baumgartner reached 24 miles in altitude in the Earth's upper stratosphere before he leaped from the capsule. Felix reached a maximum speed of 833mph, breaking the sound barrier, before slowing down at the atmosphere, where he finished with a 4:20 minute freefall.

For years, astronomers have been trying to figure out how our galaxy came to be. Even with the help of high-performance computers, no model of a spiral galaxy has ever been able to recreate the Milky Way, until now. An international team of researchers has created the first successful simulation of what happened 14 billion years ago to give our galaxy its unique shape. Turns out, all they needed was a bigger bang.

Who uses Yahoo! Image Search, you ask? Scientists apparently.

Right now, Jupiter and Venus are rising in the early morning hours just before dawn. I went outside on the morning of the 4th of July and saw Jupiter and Venus right next to each other with the Pleiades (The Seven Sisters) just above them and knew that the next morning I was going to have to get up early and set up my tripod to try and capture what I saw. I used my Panasonic GH2 with the stock zoom lens set to about 40 to 50 mm equivalent and with the aperture open to about f/5. I set my ISO to...

Hello! I invite all the readers, interested in space, to discover the origin of the names of the planets in our galaxy. Just simply follow my words,...

The annular solar eclipse was amazing. It was so much fun watching the sun transform from a thin crescent to a ring and then to a thin crescent going the other direction. I'll be posting up the pictures used to make this video in various resolutions on my photography website over the next few days, all of the way up to the full 16 megapixel ultra-detailed images.

It's taken me several weeks to figure out the  Meade Coronado SolarMax II 60 Double Stack telescope that I bought to produce a timelapse video of the solar eclipse but I'm pretty happy with the images I can produce now.  Here's hoping for clear skies tomorrow!

There is going to be an annular solar eclipse on May 20th that will be visible in a narrow pathway that covers part of Eastern Asia and the Western United States. The eclipse will be seen as a partial eclipse over a much greater region of the World. I live in Redding, California, which luckily happens to be right in the center of the path, giving a perfect ring of fire effect during the peak of the eclipse.

Just a couple Saturday's ago, we were blessed with the Supermoon, where the moon was at perigee with our planet, creating a larger than usual Moon for us here on Earth. Now, we've got another spectacular show in the skies coming up, only this one isn't at night. There will be an annular solar eclipse on Sunday, May 20th!

So, I managed to take some pics last night of the supermoon. I was dropping someone off at LAX right around perigee, so all of the images I took off the side of the road were horrible, since there were tall buildings everywhere and nothing but street and parking lot lights blocking my shots.

Last night was the so called "Supermoon," where the moon was at perigee, which is the closest orbital point to the Earth while the moon was in full phase. This makes the moon appear larger by up to about 14% and brighter by up to around 30%. I went out and used my 5-inch refracting telescope to take several pictures.

Water covers approximately 70 percent of Earth's surface and the human body contains up to 78 percent water, depending on body size. Yet, water seems to be taken for granted here on Earth. But if you travel to an orbital altitude of about 250 miles, water starts looking pretty interesting. Especially to astronaut Don Pettit on-board the International Space Station.

When he's not taking orbital videos of Earth's auroras, NASA Astronaut Don Pettit is experimenting with water in zero gravity. He's already shown us how water droplets can orbit around knitting needles in a microgravity environment. Now he's playing with water again, this time—antibubbles.

So, I got this email today from Groupon claiming today is Earth's 400 birthday. Groupon is known for their humor, but how (and why) did they pick today as Earth's 400th birthday?

I recently bought a new telescope and thought I would share a few images that I have taken with it. I am very new to astrophotography, but I hope to be able to post up some more images in the near future.

Let's say today is your birthday. You've just put those boisterous, vicenarian times behind you, reaching the first big step to your upcoming midlife crisis—30 years old. Maybe this is your midlife crisis. After all, if you're not where you want to be in life when you join the tricenarian ranks, the future starts looking bleak.

There isn't much going on this week, but be sure to try viewing the Spica-moon conjunction. It will be hard to view with the full moon, but it will be spectacular if you can snag a peak.

This morning, NASA launched the five suborbital sounding rockets from Virginia as part of ATREX (Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment). Each rocket was launched 80 seconds apart and released chemical tracers that created "milky, white clouds at the edge of space." Now, I've seen plenty of bullet tracers in my life, but these are far more poetic. Take a look at the time-lapse video and see for yourself.

Again, there are tons of events this week, and as usual, most of them are caused by Jupiter's moons. But there is some happenings with Venus, too, so don't miss out.

Seeing an aurora in person is one of the most amazing spectacles you could witness in the skies above. But what about the skies below?

I came across these beautiful wallpapers while browsing +Guy Kawasaki's Google+ stream. Basically, someone combined Calvin and Hobbes with the OS X Lion desktop wallpaper to make some truly fun artwork. Click on the link for access to the full-resolution wallpapers.