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Eighty years ago today,  Clyde William Tombaugh,  an American astronomer,  discovered Pluto. It was a PLANET until August 24, 2006. The International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto, labeling it a “dwarf planet” and not a full planet like the other eight in the solar system.Mr. Tombaugh started out as an amateur. He built his own telescopes. In 1928, at age twenty two year, he was living on a farm with his family, shoveling hay. In January, 1930, while working for an observatory, he spotted an object orbiting the sun out past Neptune, and he and took  photographs  A month later,  on February 18th, 1930, after studying the photos, he discovered “Planet X”, which was later named Pluto.  Following his discovery of Pluto, Tombaugh earned astronomy degrees and became a learned professional.  Tombaugh discovered many asteroids, and called for serious scientific research of UFOs, unidentified flying objects.For further info on Pluto and on Clyde Tombaugh:.

There’s been a lot of interest in social networking of late, especially because of the emergence of Twitter as a micro-blogging tool. I’m a fan of Twitter, but this is, so far, the coolest use I’ve seen yet for Twitter, and the Twitter-friendly image sharing service Twitpic. We’ve been able to follow, sort of, the Mars Orbiter and robots, and various announcements from JPL and NASA, which were all fabulous, but this, this is even better. International Space Station Flight engineer Soichi Noguchi is now sending back images via his Twitpic account as the ISS orbits the Earth. Totally cool, amazing, fabulous images. You can follow Soichi Noguchi’s Twitter stream in English, with lots more in Japanese. The pictures are stunning. The Twitpic page is here. Based on what I can find out Soichi is using his cell phone to take the pictures. I’m so very very amazed and stunned and delighted that this works at all, and even more so by our beautiful planet. Thanks Soichi Noguchi, thank you very very much. Domo arigato, Nogouchi-san. Pico De Orizaba,the highest mountain in Mexico London, England, with the Thames San Francisco and Golden Gate Bridge

This is a 2007 video, but it’s still pretty cool.

Samuel Arbesman, in

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an effort to diagram and present our galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy in a way that non-scientists could grasp in terms of relationships and space, came up with a nifty graphic tool. He diagramed the Milky Way by using a convention Subway Transit map as a model. It’s pretty cool; click here to read more. Click the image for a larger view with information about scale and the color-coding. 

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NASA’s Kepler Mission is dedicated to exploring the universe on the hunt for habitable planets.  The Kepler project launched in March of 2009, and consists of a very awesome telescope which finds planets based on the “habitable zone” of a star.  A star’s habitable zone is the swath of space in which a habitable planet might exist.  Earth obviously is square in the middle of Sol’s habitable zone.  Too far out and you’re too cold to easily support life, like the icy Neptune.  Too close in and you’re molten hot, like Mercury.Kepler is going to be watching for the transits of planets across the face of their suns.  This gives astronomers more information about the planets, because of a technique that can be used to determine the composition of the planet’s atmosphere.  It also lets them know more about the planet’s orbital habits – a planet which whips around the sun too quickly is not as habitable as one which transits at a comfortable speed.It used to be thought that there were very few Earth-like planets in the universe.  But recent calculations have shown that habitable planets are probably a lot more common than we originally thought.  Of course, “habitable” doesn’t mean “inhabited by intelligent life.”  It may not even mean “inhabited.”  Think of Mars, which is almost habitable.  But it is certainly not inhabited.Even if we find planets which turn out to be inhabited, they may not be inhabited by anything with which we could have a reasonable conversation.  Human intelligence is a fairly recent innovation for Earth; until our reign came along at the tail end of our planet’s history, Earth was perfectly habitable, and inhabited, but only by insects, animals, birds, plants, and so forth.The main difference between the Kepler telescope and other super telescopes like Hubble is that those telescopes were designed to see a very small section of space.  They had tunnel vision.  Kepler, on the other hand, is designed to see broad swaths of space, which will definitely help in the ongoing search for planets.  The Kepler mission is named after early astronomer Johannes Kepler, who lived in Austria in the late 1500s and early 1600s.  Kepler was a major player in the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and developed two theories of planetary motion which are now known as “Kepler’s Laws.”Kepler was born to a father who made a living as a mercenary, and a mother who was a folk doctor.  Kepler was brilliant although sickly, having been born prematurely, and having survived an attack of smallpox which left him with diminished vision and reduced use of his hands.  Kepler revolutionized astronomy with his two laws.  The first law defined a planet’s motion as an ellipse, which solved the problem of so-called “retrograde movement.”  The second law essentially states that all planets move at a steady speed.

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Aaaaah, it’s so cute. Or at least that’s probably what researchers were saying after they saw this picture of the Universe at aged 600 million years. Considering that Hubble, the ultimate in telescopes, has revealed data estimating that the Universe is 13.7 billion years old, the Universe is more like a bumbling toddler.  Due to the young age of the galaxies, there isn’t much color and the poor Universe doesn’t look quite as good as it does now.

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When a friend recently directed me to LunarLand.com, a website that supposedly attempts to sell real estate on Earth’s moon to terrestrial people in exchange for actual legal tender, I went through a few different stages of analysis and acceptance. At first I was a little offended that something so obviously absurd exists on the Internet and probably profits, then I registered some surprise at how clean and professional the site actually is. I mean, I expect something as silly as Lunar Land to be wrought with misspellings, all-caps text and many a broken table. The fact that it looks like a respectable website is actually a bit startling. At the next stage I came to my senses and assumed that the whole thing is an elaborate joke, a satire of Internet scams and corporate greed. Then I decided to read a little deeper, even into the often overlooked Terms of Service and I came to a bizarre, worrying conclusion: Lunar Land is not only real, it’s actually legitimate and kind of ingenious.In the Frequently Asked Questions section of Lunar Land it goes into the 40-year history of the celestial body real estate market in a narrative that sounds like an excellent deadpan of a very smart prank. It references such things as The United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967 and the quixotic quest of a man named Dennis Hope who, as far back as 1980, supposedly filed an official claim to land speculation with the United States government with the express purpose of selling parcels of real estate on the moon. As much as it sounds like a joke, I did a little research and discovered that there is indeed a recognized, signed document known as The Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies created by the United Nations. The document was first signed by the United States, the USSR and the United Kingdom in the winter of 1967 and has been in effect since the following autumn. Now every country in the world except for a few nations in Africa and South America has signed and officially recognized the treaty.What’s more, there are no current laws on the books in any country that expressly prohibit private ownership of land outside of Earth. Sure, there are laws against keeping weapons of mass destruction in orbit and doing military exercises in space, but no government has made it illegal to prospect on extraterrestrial land that currently can’t legally belong to an existing government. None of these countries have gone so far as to recognize the many deeds sold for land on the moon, Mars and other non-Earth locales, but they’d have a bit of a problem contesting any of this stuff down the line.Now, I don’t actually believe that Lunar Land or any of its contemporaries will ever be capable of staking their claims and it’s currently not even possible to homestead places like the Sea of Tranquility, but the existence of funny laws has a way of resulting in some strange, even revolutionary events. When multi-billion dollar corporations decide to start the off-world land grab, they’re going to have legal precedent to do so. Thanks to Cold War paranoia, we can look forward to Virgin Moon and the Capitol Records Mars Hydroponics Lab.Hell, maybe it won’t work out this way, but it’s still worth thinking about. Lunar Land is one of many things on the Internet that seem like indications, even warning signs, of a very weird future. That, or it’s the most complicated, glorious bid to use the Internet to make a lot of money selling absolutely nothing to gullible strangers. Beats the hell out of $5 prayer medicine, anyway.

The second full moon

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in a single month is a fairly rare occurence, rare enough that it’s called a blue moon. A blue moon occurs every 2.7 years because our twelve month calendar doesn’t quite match the lunar cycle or the time it takes for the moon to revolve around the Earth. A lunar cycle takes 29 days, 12 hours, and 44 minutes. Roughly. I should note that the moon doesn’t, unfortunately, turn even slightly blue, but it’s still an additional opportunity to view a full moon. New Year’s eve this year is a blue moon; we’ve already had one on December 2. But it’s even more nifty than that. First, while a blue moon occurs about every 2 and a half years, we haven’t had one on New Year’s Eve since 1990. For those of us in most of Europe, Africa, Asia or Australia, the New Year’s blue moon will also partially eclipse; lucky viewers will see a noticeable darker edge along the moon’s full disk. So when you’re making your resolutions, and drinking that sparkling wine, give a thought to going outside for a moment, and admiring our lovely satellite in all her glory. May 2010 be a year of peace, beauty, and abundance for all of us.

The American Museum

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of Natural History has produced a new film The Known Universe that is a companion piece to a current exhibit called Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, currently at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City. The film, embedded above, is a sort of universal fly-over, that begins at the Himalayas, and ends with the Big Bang’s “afterglow.” It’s all data-driven, too, based on the four-dimensional Digital Universe Atlas, maintained by astrophysicists at The Hayden Planetarium, part of the American Museum of Natural History.

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From the original YouTube post: The snowman is 10 µm across, 1/5th the width of a human hair. The snowman was made from two tin beads used to calibrate electron microscope astigmatism. The eyes and smile were milled using a focused ion beam, and the nose, which is under 1 µm wide, is ion beam deposited platinum. A nanomanipulation system was used to assemble the parts ‘by hand’ and platinum deposition was used to weld all elements together. The snowman is mounted on a silicon cantilever from an atomic force microscope whose sharp tip ‘feels’ surfaces creating topographic surveys at almost atomic scales.