Playing Scrabble with Augustus John

Kepler

This is a cracking image from NASA's APOD by Ben Cooper of the recent launch of the Kepler telescope. Kepler will be looking for changes in the brightness of more than a million stars every five hours, searching for "winks" in light that happen when a planet passes in front of its star.

Planet spotting outside the solar system is still in its infancy with only three hundred odd Jupiter sized gas giants on record. What Kepler will do is look for Earth-like planets in the habitable zone around stars where liquid water may exist.

Exciting times indeed.

Up, up and away...

This is a neat little part of the NASA site, where each day they post a different picture. This one is a picture through a telescope of a science balloon over Antarctica. The balloon is over 70m in diameter and it is hoped that it will carry instrumentation to carry out experiments in the upper atmosphere.

Jules Verne

As some of you may know, the Jules Verne space freighter is docked with the International Space Station. This picture has been taken by John Locker with a ground based camera. Jules Verne is the small pod on the far South East of the station. Apparently it's about the size of a double decker and weighs around 15 tonnes.

I would love to take pictures like that. I'm sure it would take some serious equipment to catch something travelling at 17,000 mph. I do have a camera and tripod though, and keep meaning to take pictures of the night sky.

Maybe it's time to start.