The Victoria Beckham of galaxies

                                                                            NGC 4452. Or a lightsaber.

Pocket Universe iPhone App

Boy howdy, it's a good thing I spent whatever-hundred dollars on a heavy, cumbersome, won't-work-within-a-hundred-feet-of-a-beer-can-much-less-a-car, can't-acquire-GPS-signals-if-there's-so-much-as-a-basil-plant-in-the-vicinity-blocking-the-signal SkyScout a few years back. Otherwise I would have had to wait a whole, like, three months for smartphones to be invented and have things like astronomy apps that cost less than a six-pack of cheap beer.


Pocket Universe: Virtual Sky Astronomy; $2.99.


Key Features

• Easy-to-use astronomy application, which focuses on helping you answer the question “What’s that in the sky?”
• Works on all iPhones and iPod Touch devices with latest firmware (iPhone 3GS/4 required for compass support)
• Tracks the ISS, and predicts sightings
• Special “Show Me” mode will guide you to named stars, planets, constellations as well as the brightest galaxies and nebulae.
• “Tonight’s Sky” and “Objects and Events” will keep you up-to-date, and give you suggestions for what to look for when you head outside.
• Constellation Quiz to help you learn your way around the sky.
• Links to Wikipedia articles for the latest information.
• Responsive customer support, frequent updates.



Specifications
•Plots the position of the Sun, Moon and Planets (including Pluto)
•Displays 10,000 stars and the Messier Catalog of Deep Sky objects.
•Draws Constellations outlines, with mythological artwork
•Lunar phases for the current, next and previous months
•Plan observations with list of meteor showers and visible planets
•Constellation and Star Quiz games help you learn your way around the sky
•Jupiter’s and Saturn’s Moons (visible in a telescope)
•Regularly updated news section for viewing suggestions
•Night Vision mode
•Augmented Reality camera mode for use during evening/dawn on iPhone devices.
•Location found automatically or may be specified manually.

For Sue :)

Cosmetologist:

Cosmologist:

The Gollum Nebula®

I expect royalty checks for dropping this into your lap, Naming Nerds.

(Yeah, yeah - I know, but "Dobby Nebula" just sounds dumb.)

Cutest. astronaut. evah.

Sorry,folks.

We are flipping. doomed.

We'd need, like, a million Bruce Willises to deal with this. 

Separated at Birth?

So I'm sitting in Manuel's with our friends, Greg and Janet Anderson, when it occurs to me that Greg looks very much like Garrett will look 10 or 20 years hence. Greg is a great guy whose son, Peter, was a linebacker at West Point and is now serving in Afghanistan. Greg and his wife, Janet, were celebrating their 29th anniversary with a burger and beer at Manuel's. So I took this photo of him. He's the one not in the astronaut suit.

Practice Makes Perfect

The crew of STS-133 completed a practice run today, and all went well. Discovery Commander Steve Lindsey, pilot Eric Boe, and specialists Alvin Drew, Tim Kopra, Michael Barratt and Nicole Stott are now headed back to Houston, the place they take astronauts so they won't be that sad to leave Earth.

Discovery, which launches on Nov. 1, will spend 11 days in space. It will deliver the Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM), which will provide additional storage for the station crew, spare components (c'mon, just say "spare parts") and the Express Logistics Carrier 4, which holds large equipment (refrigerators? buses? backhoes?). It will also carry Robonaut 2 ( R2), which you think they would have named Robonaut 2, Device 2, so it could be R2D2. Who's naming these things?

Once Discovery launches, R2, which is inside the PMM and will become a permanent resident of the ISS, will be the first human-like robot in space.

But Garrett is not going, so who really cares? Not this blog.

(Actually, this blog does care because this blog loves the space shuttles and space in general. Almost as much as this blog loves Garrett. But at least it will give Garrett a chance to see the Yankees, with the highest payroll in baseball, beat up on the Rangers, who have the fifth lowest.)

RIP, John Huchra

John Huchra, a professor of cosmology at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the man who (with two women, Margaret Geller and Valerie de Lapparent) mapped the universe and turned conventional theory about galaxies on its head, died last Friday. His mapping of the Coma Supercluster was possibly the most famous map of the universe ever made, largely because it looked like the stick figure of a person. The supercluster was in the middle of a "Great Wall" of galaxies with a length of about six hundred million light years. It confirmed that the galaxies in the universe are arranged in sheets and walls surrounding large nearly-empty voids.

“His passing has upset more of us than I remember for any other astronomer,” said Tod Lauer, an astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, in a New York Times obit.

We Are Not Alone, and I Hope They Don't Come for Garrett

Ever since I discovered how big the universe actually is, I have been convinced that we are not alone in it. I mean, we are a tiny blip in an itty bitty portion of the Milky Way, and there are, according to a 1999 Hubble estimate, roughly 125 billion galaxies in the universe. Other estimates go as high as 500 billion. Regardless of how many billions we accept as true, the question remains: Why in the world would we think it possible that we are the only intelligent life out there?

Anyway, last Monday, seven USAF personnel talked to the National Press Club about how they believe that aliens are out there, AND they are interested in our nuclear weapons facilities. The six former officers and one ex-enlisted man said they either personally saw UFOs hovering over nuclear missile silos or nuclear weapons storage areas in the 1960s, '70s and '80s or heard reports of such from their subordinates.

Three of the former Air Force officers said that UFOs hovering over silos around Montana’s Malmstrom Air Force Base in 1967 appeared to have temporarily deactivated some of the nuclear missiles.

Meanwhile, one of the largest telescopes in North America, the 72-inch All Sky Optical SETI scope, owned by The Planetary Society and operated by a Harvard University team, is looking for pulses of light that would confirm contact with extraterrestrial life. According to the Society, the telescope, with its cutting-edge processors, crunches, in one second, more data than what is stored in all books in print.

I hope we find something. But I worry that, if they find us and they figure out how smart and funny Garrett is, we could lose him.