Private space companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic are revolutionizing space exploration with innovations like reusable rockets and ambitious goals for interplanetary travel. These advancements are reshaping the industry, creating opportunities for more competitors and contributing to job creation. Exciting developments are expected in the near future, bringing us closer to the stars as new tourist destinations.
The Iris Nebula is a reflection nebula 1,300 light years away, illuminated by a partially embedded star (SAO 19158) which is 10X the size of our Sun. The…
[](https://orbitingfrog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/deneb-sadr.jpg) Deneb-Sadr and (some of) the Milky Way in Cygnus. Taken from Provence, France.…
I got into a conversation recently about how some astronomical photos can totally change your whole perspective of yourself and your place in the Universe.…
Executable papers are a cool idea in research [1]. You take a study, write it up as a paper and bundle together all your code, scripts and analysis in such a…
[](http://amzn.to/1hY4O17) I've started a page with some links, facts and ideas for teachers, educators and anyone else that wants them. Quite often when I’m…
[](https://media.orbitingfrog.com/uploads/2026/02/1771788064982-u18vnf.jpg) Just over three years the Zooniverse launched the Milky Way Project (MWP), my…
Astronomers are sometimes asked to defend public funding of their work. It’s difficult to answer because I really do think that there are lots of things we…
A new journal begins today, Astronomy and Computing, covering the intersection of astronomy, computer science and information technology. This journal is…
The periodic mention of a 'supermoon' in the news cycle is starting to annoy me. A supermoon is simply not that much bigger than any other Moon! It's…
[](https://orbitingfrog.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/m45-pleiades-jack-newton.jpg) Image Credit: Jack Newton There's a cool paper on arXiv today in…
ESA’s Planck mission reported results today showing the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB, see below) in greater detail than ever before. Planck achieves this…
[](http://www.zooteach.org) I was at RAL today, as part of a teacher training event run by the National Space Academy, to talk about the Zooniverse and how our…
During our Stargazing Oxford event on January 12th we had three sets of mini-lectures. These are short, concise talks about astrophysics that anyone should get…
We’re very pleased to present the Unproceedings of the Fourth .Astronomy Conference (.Astronomy 4), which was held in Heidelberg, Germany, July 9-11 2012. The…
Join us at the Physics Department on Keble Road, near St. Giles in Oxford. From 2-10pm we’ll be manning stands, doing craft activities and answering questions.…
Last week we launched a brand new Zooniverse site: The Andromeda Project. We’re asking people to spot star clusters in the Andromeda galaxy in data from the…
A couple of weeks ago I began to geocode the database of astronomical research I scraped from NASA ADS during .Astronomy 4. This database consists of all the…
Over on this link, you’ll find a data-driven document (D3 FTW!) showing collaboration between the most authorship-intensive institutions in astronomy. The…
I (or rather my computer) spent most of this morning geocoding the database of astronomical papers that I scraped from NASA ADS a while back. I’ve got about a…
I have been exploring the terms used in the astronomical literature (see previous post), and have turned my attention to terms that seem to correlate with each…
At .Astronomy 4 in Heidelberg, I began hacking on some natural language processing of the astronomical literature as part of my Hack Day project with Sarah…
In 2008, in the midst of my PhD, I ran a conference called .Astronomy. The idea was to bring together all the other astronomers who were into the web and…
The other week I gave a talk at Allensbank Primary School - a nearby school for children aged 4 to 11. I mainly told them about the planets and the Solar…