I experienced a bit of my own private solar eclipse yesterday, which is never much fun. Sure I have the whole day/night cycle thing down, but when you're solar powered, losing the sun for a bit means running on fumes for awhile. Still, I made it through alright, though I know it's going to have me thrown off for at least a week.

Know what's boring? Asteroids. Just chunks of rock floating around. Big damn deal. Know what I've been looking at entirely too much lately? Asteroids. Yup, the gals on Mars would probably be interested to know that even I've been relegated to rock photography duty. I'm starting to understand why Spirit protested for awhile, I'm actually ( Read more... )

Some Sedna images.By means of explination. The bottom left was the parallax image I described in my last post, showing a streaking Sedna next to an apparently motionless star. This was a 16 hour exposure, so all of the motion of Sedna that you see is from the parallax, and not from the orbit of Sedna itself ( Read more... )

Guide her to...uh...Sedna, underneath your silvery light ( Read more... )

Been a busy week for me, as most of the grants for my time over the next cycle started being handed out. In fact, I was so busy paying attention to that, I missed that the wonderful folks at the Hubble Heritage Team released their monthly image ( Read more... )

Hey, realized today that I haven't updated my journal for awhile, and who can blame me. I got to look at Saturn's rings, and now they've got me figuring the statistical frequency of binary asteroids within the primary asteroid belt. If that's not some seriously exciting stuff, I don't know what is ( Read more... )

Yeah, I know, we're all working together, but I can't help but feel my operators on the ground are trying to scoop the Cassini probe, as I've got Saturn in the queue for the second week in a row. Last week I was exploring the atmosphere of saturn with my NICMOS to try and get some atmospheric readings from Saturn's solstice (which you're going to ( Read more... )

It seemed like the thing to do. Somehow I don't make as attractive a human as the young ladies on Mars do, but here ya go.

The news seems full of efforts to save me, which I love reading, but figure there's only so many nearly identical articles that I can really post, so I've decided to dig back into my archive again until the next public release ( Read more... )

Well, this is one of those times when it's kind of boring to be me. I'm getting digital images, sending them down, but none are getting released. I've seen some damn cool stuff in the last two weeks, but it's forbidden to talk about them, cause there's usually a one-year window during which the observations are the property of the scientist who ( Read more... )