A new image from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile shows a beautiful view of clouds of cosmic dust nebula NGC 1999 in the region of Orion. While these dense interstellar…

Low pressure areas that dropped more than a foot of snow in some Midwestern states have prompted many warnings and weather advisories. Satellite data recently got a look at a major snowstorm. On Dec…

A team of astronomers have measured an excess of X-ray radiation in the first few minutes of collapsing massive stars, which may be the signature of the supernova shock wave first escaping from the…

If you looked at the "Black Marble" images of Earth at night released by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week, you may have noticed bright areas in the largely…

The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) on NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is now 10 times better at catching the brief outbursts of high-energy light, known as  terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (…

How do you test the effects of weightlessness in space without risking lives and a lot of money? Use a bed. People in bed with their heads 6° below the horizontal for long periods causes their bodies…

Move over Flight of the Bumblebee. Hello Flight of the Butter Tubs. That’s what you could call the daring 12,000 mile journey that Australian pilot Jeremy Rowsell is planning for early next year,…

In January, 2005, ESA’s Huygens probe bounced, slid and wobbled its way to rest for 10 seconds after touching down on Saturn’s moon, Titan. As you can imagine, that tells scientists quite a bit about…

Early in the morning of September 12th the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), the most powerful sky survey instrument yet built, mounted on the Victor Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-…

I've been feeling a bit inspired about our prospects in space, lately.  Foremost (of course) by the incredible competence displayed by the makers of the Curiosity probe that landed on Mars, last…