Here is the transcript for my podcast about how to see the Scutum Star Cloud, the Wild Duck Cluster, and Barnard’s Galaxy during the next few days. Check out the Astronomy.com's interactive star chart to see an accurate map of your sky. It'll help you locate some of this week's key targets. Astronomy magazine subscribers have access to a slew of cool functions. --Start transcript-- The Scutum Star Cloud, the Wild Duck Cluster, and Barnard...

An interesting pamphlet came across my desk about Spacefest 2009 , and I thought some of you might want to check it out. After a successful debut in 2007, the sponsor of Spacefest, space memorabilia source Novaspace , has put together a sequel. The 2009 event will take place February 19-22 at the Town & Country Resort and Convention Center in San Diego. The gathering will have an autograph show featuring pioneering astronauts such as Moonwalkers...

I have to commend Andrew Fraknoi and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific on a great new web resource that came across my desk yesterday. “Women in Astronomy: An Introductory Resource Guide to Materials in English” is an excellent index for astronomy and history enthusiasts who want to learn more about how the female gender has impacted our study of the universe. It contains print and web references for the general topic of women in astronomy,...

Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Michael Bakich will talk with Jon Grayson of KMOX radio (AM 1120) in St. Louis Sunday night at 9:10 Central. Jon invited Michael to be a monthly guest on the station's "Reality Check" program. Their conversation typically lasts 15-20 minutes. They discuss articles from the latest issue of Astronomy , what objects are visible in the sky this month, and other space-related topics. You can listen to Michael's...

Here is the transcript for my podcast about how to see the Summer Triangle, the North America Nebula, and the Bow-Tie Nebula during the next few days. Check out the Astronomy.com's interactive star chart to see an accurate map of your sky. It'll help you locate some of this week's key targets. Astronomy magazine subscribers have access to a slew of cool functions. Targets for August 29-September 4 Naked-eye: Summer Triangle Small telescope...

Last week , I told you we would show you a new map of Mercury based on the January MESSENGER flyby. Here it is, kindly provided by one of NASA’s master mappers, Robert Gaskell of the Planetary Science Institute in Altadena, California. This image is an anaglyph — a flat image that simulates a three-dimensional view — of the fault scarp Beagle Rupes as it cuts across the crater Sveinsdóttir. The area shown here is about 160 miles (257 kilometers) square...

In Dan Pendick's blog, "Mercury's master mapper," he told you we were converting two high-resolution animations from Robert Gaskell, a participating scientist in the MESSENGER mission to Mercury, of the asteroids Eros and Itokawa. Well, we're done converting them to Flash, and you can now view them. We've housed the converted animations on Astronomy.com, so click on the asteroid names below to watch them: Asteroid Eros Asteroid...

The October issue of Astronomy is in the hands of subscribers and hits newsstands next Tuesday. For readers, it means interesting new articles and amazing photographs; for me, it means the time has come to update Astronomy.com to reflect our new issue. Updating the web site for each issue was a new responsibility given to me just two weeks ago. And while I consider myself pretty computer savvy, analyzing words on paper is definitely more of my strong...

It’s funny who you get to know on an eclipse trip . I’ve met corporate executives, small-business owners, professional photographers, and lots of others. On our recent trip to Siberia to view the August 1 total solar eclipse , we met Ed Piwowarski , a guy who paints movie sets. My wife and I are both big movie fans, so we asked him what movies he had worked on. He mentioned several box-office hits, some independent films, and others not so well known...

Many people — at least, many of the people science writers write for — read to satisfy a basic curiosity about the universe. How does the world work? What’s out there in the unfathomable great beyond of outer space? Astronomy readers, in particular, enjoy getting their minds bent around improbable ideas like black holes, multi-dimensional universes, and lakes on Titan filled with that stuff in your barbecue grill gas tank. But can writing about science...