NASA's 19-year-old Hubble Space Telescope still has a few tricks up its sleeve!  New images were released today from Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3.  Installed back in March, WFC3…

Old notion: Giant clouds of gas and dust to collapse inward due to gravity, growing denser and hotter until igniting nuclear fusion and forming stars.  New notion:  It's more than just…

We have been in an anomalously long Solar Minimum.  The sun has an 11 year cycle from Minimum to Maximum.  But the cycles are (like most things in nature) not exact, and some are longer…

ESA's XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescope has uncovered the first close-up of a white dwarf star, circling a companion star, that could explode into a particular kind of supernova. Well, in a few…

Welcome to Traceback, where I find articles other people have written on Project Calliope.  Having publically announced less than a week ago and with just 2 pieces written, I can safely…

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory was closed Monday as wildfires came within two miles of the facility.  The decision to give most of the 5,000 employees the day off was made Sunday evening.…

A TubeSat picosatellite lifts 200 grams of payload. That's about 7 ounces. Looked at one way, that's less than half a can of soda. But it's enough to lift an entire Nintendo DS game handheld into…

A new image of nearby galaxy NGC 4945 shows that it looks a lot like our own Milky Way. NGC 4945 seems to be a spiral galaxy with swirling, luminous arms and a bar-shaped central region, though NGC…

A giant galaxy, so distant that it is seen as it was 12.8 billion years ago, is as large as the Milky Way and contains a supermassive black hole with at least a billion times as much matter as our…

This here, "The Sky By Day", is my science writing column.  I write about current news and cultural issues in space and computer science.  Very simple, very journalistic:   …