kuky's blog

Thanks to the much-heralded International Year of Astronomy, this much we know: Galileo used a telescope to observe the moon in 1609. But the inventor of the revolutionary resolutionary device remains unknown, and its early history is muddied by simultaneous discoveries and competing claims.

MIT Students Beat NASA On Beer-Money Budget

Bespoke is old hat. Off-the-shelf is in. Even Google runs the world’s biggest and scariest server farms on computers home-made from commodity parts. DIY is cheaper and often better, as Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh found out when they decided to send a camera into space.

British photographer Martin Pugh has been named the Astronomy Photographer of the Year. Martin’s Horsehead Nebula, which also won the Deep Space category, was taken with a 12.5” diameter Richey-Chrétien telescope and CCD camera mounted in his garden shed in Canberra, Australia. Martin, originally from Dudley in the Midlands, acquired the picture over 14 nights with a total exposure time of 19 hours

Anybody here has Flickr account?
I can add a feature to 'blog' from your flickr account any pic you may like to blog about
Post it here FROM flickr with description
Just let me know if anybody interested

A group of hunters aboard a small boat out of the tiny Alaska village of Wainwright were the first to spot what would eventually be called "the blob." It was a dark, floating mass stretching for miles through the Chukchi Sea, a frigid and relatively shallow expanse of Arctic Ocean water between Alaska's northwest coast and the Russian Far East. The goo was fibrous, hairy. When it touched floating ice, it looked almost black.
Read full article here:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0%2c8599%2c1911517%2c00.html

and some more here
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_sc826

Suck it up, conspiracy theorists, because soon your cuckoo stories about the US simulating the Moon landings will be over forever. NASA has confirmed to Gizmodo that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will take photos of all the Apollo landing sites ...

A German boy is the first person in over 50 years to get struck by a meteorite and live to tell the story. Wired.com reports the boy was walking home from school when the meteorite hit his hand, leaving a 3-inch scar. The meteorite then crashed to the ground, creating a foot-wide crater. It should be noted that the meteorite was only pea-sized.

See more on Wired.com

The Camera That Saved Hubble... Twice: JPL's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2

For scary speculation about the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists. But that’s exactly what a group of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms.

Look! Up in the sky?! … No, down on your iPhone. It’s the entire night sky on your iPhone! GoSkyWatch Planetarium is more than a mouthful, and I’m surprised it doesn’t make your iPhone heavier simply because of how much data it contains.

http://www.appleiphoneapps.com/2008/08/review-goskywatch-planetarium/#mo...

And a Free iPhone app "Stars"

http://nelix-dev.com/