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Well, it’s over. I managed to listen to yesterday’s entire meeting of the Texas State Board of Education without throwing anything at my computer, which was definitely a personal victory. I commented over on the TFN blog that there is no way I would have been able to keep quiet if I had gone down [...]

Models of the inner planets from the Rose Center for Earth and Space and Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. August 2006.

In a happy synchronicity, the same week that I attended a lecture by Rare Earth co-author Don Brownlee, two posts on the same topic showed up on a couple of blogs I read. First was Kepler and the Rare Earth hypothesis from Chris Rowan’s Highly Allochthonous, followed by A Habitable Zone by any other name… [...]

I love being from Texas (I was even born on Texas Independence Day). But there are some things that just leave me shaking my head. And unfortunately I’ve been shaking my head a lot lately…
I was going to write up my own summary of all that has been going on, but this post at the [...]

Spotted via Bad Astronomy, this New York Times article:
While Times Square is not known for star gazing — the celestial kind, that is — and few people would normally venture onto a pitch-black ball field in Inwood to see the constellations, two unrelated, if not unlikely, projects hope to turn the city’s night eyes skyward.
Jason [...]

The Hobby-Ebery Telescope at McDonald Observatory. December 2003.
This photo was taken from the TQ (or Astronomers Lodge as it is now formally known) at sunset. I only learned just a couple of years ago that the pink line visible at sunrise/sunset is called The Belt of Venus, which I thought was a lovely poetic name.

In an attempt to start posting more than just the Picture of the Week, here’s a link to The 107th Skeptics’ Circle over at The Skeptic’s Field Guide! Maybe one of these days I’ll actually have something worth submitting myself.
I’ll be posting a write-up of a lecture I went to last week by “Rare Earth” [...]

Gemini VII capsule at the National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center. September 2006.
From the information plaque:
Frank Borman and James A. Lovell Jr. lifted off aboard Gemini VII on December 4, 1965. Their primary mission was to show that humans could live in weightlessness for 14 days, an endurance record that stood until [...]

The Eagle Nebula (M16) taken with the Prime Focus Camera on the 30-inch telescope at McDonald Observatory in 1998 (AASTRA participants took the images and then I combined them into the final color image you see here).