First Photograph of Extra Solar Planet

Friday, November 14th, 2008

So very awesome.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Astronomy Picture of the Day - The Sun

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

Just because it’s that awesome.  You should definitely look at signing up to the APOD RSS feed.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Links for October 25th through October 26th

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

Popularity: 15% [?]

Links for October 22nd

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Popularity: 11% [?]

Astronomy makes a good winter hobby

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

While I love the snow part of winter (which we don’t get nearly enough of down here in in Poughkeepsie), I used to hate the dark part of winter.  The Sun setting at 4:45 in December is sort of depressing.

I say I used to, because now I’m eager for sundown, as it means I can grab the binoculars or the telescope and wander outside.  Now, a 6 pm sunset in October is great.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Links for October 17th

Friday, October 17th, 2008

Popularity: 13% [?]

Links for 2008-10-16

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Main Page - Stellarium
This is the ideal software for getting familiar with the night skies. I love that I can actually go back and look up stars that I was staring at here and figure out what they are.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Links for 2008-10-15

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

Open source gets pragmatic | The Pervasive Datacenter - CNET News
Open source has, in a sense, won. By which I mean that it’s entered the mainstream and has, to no small degree, heavily influenced how companies do development, engage with user and developer communities, and provide access to their products. Furthermore, the well-established success of many open-source projects (Linux, Apache, Samba… the list is long) makes many of the long-ago barbs thrown at open source (insecure, risky, unsupported, etc.) risible in today’s world. Open-source advocates no longer need to jumpstart a software revolution. They can afford to be pragmatic.

Install Ubuntu Hardy Heron on a T61p - ThinkWiki
Should have bookmarked this a long time ago, as hal updates force you to redo this

Hubble Legacy Archive
A search engine for the existing hubble data that’s out there

Popularity: 12% [?]

A view of Astronomy in 1970

Saturday, October 11th, 2008

Tonight we were at the library, as I needed to pick up an inter library loan book. As per usual they had a table of old books for sale, which I was flipping through.

One of those books was “Astronomy”, published some time in the early 1970s. Towards the center were some really fuzzy pictures of Mars and Saturn. And it occurred to me. This was prior to the Viking missions, and the Voyager missions. In 1970 our understanding of even our own solar system was incredible elementary.

As I now look at beautiful images taken by Hubble over the last decade, it’s hard to believe how recent all this knowledge really is, and how much more we are sure to discover.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Links for 2008-10-08

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

Astronomy Picture of the Day RSS Feed
The Astronomy Picture of the Day is a wonderful web site that puts up a different astronomy-related picture every day. However, the site does not have an RSS feed. This page fixes that deficiency.

Improbable Research
ignoble winners for this year, really great list of awards

Popularity: 13% [?]


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