Duck! I mean, owl!
This super slo-mo video of an owl has nothing to do with astronomy. It’s just really cool. Watching the end made me suddenly want to cross my legs and cringe. Yikes.

The Milky Way bulges with cannibalized corpses!
Why do spiral galaxies have central bulges? Some are bigger, some smaller, but pretty much every spiral galaxy we see has a roughly spherical puffy bulge of stars in its core (like in the edge-on spiral NGC 4565, shown here to the right). This downtown region of a galactic city is a bit mysterious. It contains old stars, very little ga

Mr. Hubble goes to Washington
Hey, if you’re in the Washington DC area until mid-December, make a special effort to go to the National Air and Space Museum. It’s a rockin’ cool place in its own right, but for the next couple of weeks it’ll be extra-special: WFPC2 and COSTAR — two of the instruments from the Hubble Space Telescope that were removed in the last servicing mission — will be on display there! An older camera, the Faint Object Spectrograph,

Cassini takes home video of Saturn’s aurora
Cassini keeps amazing me, even when I start to think I’m getting used to incredible images beamed back from Saturn. But this is new: it took several images of Saturn’s aurora, and strung them together to make a video! Here’s a still frame: The

Scale the solar system
Speaking of web pages showing scale (OK, it was almost two weeks ago, but still cool), BABloggee Mike Sperry reminded me of this site which shows the solar system to scale… all on one web page! The Sun is displayed when you go to the page, and you can scroll to the right to see the planets, drawn in scale both in size and distance. The Sun is about 560 pixels wide, putting Pluto something like 2 million pixels to the right. And some people wonder why it’ll take