Candleblog

x-posted at The Contrarian.
First up in the Spacetime continuum…
*Look at this fucking picture of the surface of Mars.
*Once every billion years or so, heat deep with the Saturnian moon of Enceladus causes ice volcanoes to erupt like crazy. It turns out this once-in-a-billion-years event is happening right now as Cassini watches.
*Speaking of volcanos, the first [...]

Ed. note: I’ve been doing these weekly Spacetime Reports at The Contrarian for a while now and I’m going to cross post them here for a while too since things have been a bit slow. Enjoy…
Unfortunately, the new year has produced precious little in the way of interesting cosmological tidbits so far. I did scrounge [...]

The Perseids are coming! The Perseids are coming!
NASA…
For sky watchers in North America, the watch begins after nightfall [...]

Here are the full Moon names for 2009 according to Space.com…
Jan. 10, 10:27 p.m. EST – Full Wolf Moon. Amid the zero cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages.  It was also known as the Old Moon or the moon after Yule.  In some tribes this was the [...]

Tonight’s full moon will be bigger and brighter than any full moon since 1993. It’s fairly rare when the perigee point of the moon’s orbit coincides with the full moon. The result is a big, bright, werewolf-inducing sight.
And no, there’s no reason to suspect that the extra bright full moon will result in more [...]

Astronomers have confirmed (again) that there really is indeed a super-massive black hole lurking at the center of our galaxy.
Synchronize your cesium clocks! The world’s official time keepers will be adding an extra “leap second” to the atomic clocks that keep “official” time at 23:59:59 UTC on December 31st. Yes, that means you get to [...]

Tomorrow morning I will attend my first Vermont ACLU meeting as a member of the Board of Directors. That’s right, I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU and I’m on their board. So far, this has benefited me by being a really good excuse to give the ACLU donation-seekers: “um, I already volunteer my time [...]

I don’t normally link to the often-brilliant XKCD strip because all of the other, cooler bloggers get to it before I do.  I’m linking to this one though because of its extra awesome-osity.  It’s too big to show you the whole thing in this post, but here’s a detail…