I just received a media advisory from James Oberg, a contributor to Astronomy and noted space historian. And I learned something new — something historic. Something I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t know. It appears that many video producers continue to misrepresent Neil Armstrong’s comments the day he stepped onto the Moon (that's Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin pictured at right). Oberg explains it best: The National Geographic Channel is running...

The discovery and optical imaging of Fomalhaut b , a planet orbiting the nearby star Fomalhaut, has wider implications for exoplanet science. I talked to NASA scientist Marc Kuchner about it. Kuchner works in the Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He uses computer models to study the effect planets have on interplanetary dust. Kuchner (pictured at left below) and Christopher Stark...

OK, I admit it: I’m a Marsaholic. We’ve been following the mission and writing about it for the magazine. You’ve probably seen the various headlines: Phoenix lands safely; Phoenix confirms water in martian soil; Phoenix detects perchlorate chemicals in martian soil; and, finally, Phoenix runs low on power and shuts down . So what’s this all going to come to? When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, dreams of future Mars exploration inspired and...

India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar probe will fire a rocket Saturday, November 8, to insert itself into orbit. As I sat down to prepare a magazine news article about the mission earlier this week, I found myself lacking a decent piece of space art of the probe. A web search led me not to the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which lofted the craft, but to a talented space enthusiast in England named Doug Ellison . He kindly provided the image of...

I recently received a telephone call from a jazz musician, Michael Roach. He explained to me that he and the other members of the trio TEN27 have created seven original compositions inspired by astronomy and cosmology. As it turns out, a news article I wrote about the galaxy I Zwicky 18 for the February 2008 issue inspired one of their songs. The trio is holding an event this week called " The Black Book Project ." It is a multimedia-live...

India’s lunar probe Chandrayaan-1 finally blasted off last night. Make that one more space-faring nation on its way back to the Moon. One of Astronomy magazine’s columnists, James Oberg, sent the information below out to the various media interests he writes for and agreed to let me share it with you. In case you don’t know who Jim Oberg is, he is one of the world's leading popularizers and interpreters of space exploration. His classic Red Star...

For a couple of years, the giant Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has been under threat of closure because of budget cuts proposed by the National Science Foundation. It appears the budget axe will not fall on Arecibo’s valley-spanning disk just yet. Here is some communication we just received from Emily Schoenfelder of Edelman Public Relations in Washington, D.C.: “The future of the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope and site for some...

Rocky, earthlike planets are way too small and dim to detect directly with today’s telescopes. Astronomers at Goddard Space Flight Center may have found a really clever way around this problem. The NASA researchers think we might be able to spot tiny planets based on their gravitational effects on interplanetary dust particles . Our solar system has dust, and you can see it as a faint glow called the zodiacal light, visible before sunrise or after...

If you want to witness something historic, get on the next flight to Sudan. That’s where a unique meteorological event may take place late tonight. Astronomer Rich Kowalski of the Catalina Sky Survey in Tucson discovered asteroid 2008 TC3 last night. And astronomers predict that tonight, on October 7 Africa time, the object will enter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up in a spectacular fireball. The asteroid is only a few meters across at most, so it...

Trillions of miles way, disks and gas and dust encircle baby stars just a few million years old. Rocky planetary cores form, then sweep through the disks, accreting additional material around themselves like a cardboard tube swirling through a carnival cotton-candy machine. As the protoplanets gain mass, they carve racetrack-like gaps in the gaseous disk. How do I know this? Dan Watson told me. He’s an astronomer at the University of Rochester in...