Gerald Ford, the United States' 38th president, passed away yesterday at age 93. Most citizens, regardless of how they feel about his political affiliation, give him credit for mending a nation rocked by the Watergate scandal created by his predecessor. As many reflect on Ford's legacy, his support of U.S. efforts in space should not be overlooked. As a member of the House, he was instrumental in passing legislation that developed NASA. President...

I haven't seen many dark skies. I guess I'm just a city girl. It's easy to forget to look up when there's not much to see except Orion and the Moon. I've seen them before. But I've been to Kitt Peak in Arizona, where I marveled at the number of stars. And I spent a summer living in the Greek countryside, where the Milky Way was bright overhead. The " Online extra " for February's " Simple steps to save the...

Satellite images have become such a staple of nightly TV weather segments, it's difficult to imagine a time when they didn't exist. Yet, the first full-disk images of a cloudy Earth turned 40 earlier this month. It's not much to look at by modern standards. But images like this from ATS-1's spin-scan cloud camera revolutionized meteorology. NASA An innovative device called a spin-scan camera made these first images possible. The first...

You can cram a lot of data in a 156-page book. For example, we just received Steve Coe's Nebulae and How to Observe Them (Springer, London, 2006). If you're a beginning or intermediate observer, and if you're interested in observing nebulae, this is a book you should check out. I like the book for many reasons. Coe writes in a conversational tone. You can sample many of Coe's stories in the pages of Astronomy . As I write this blog...

Time travel has always intrigued me. Sometimes, I like to imagine what it would have been like to witness an historic event. Say, to be on the balcony with Galileo when he first saw the moons of Jupiter or the phases of Venus, and started us down the long road to understanding our place in the universe. Other times, I think about what the future may hold. So, it should come as no surprise that I perked up when I read the latest update from the Jet...

At the start of the classic film Enter the Dragon , Bruce Lee's character tells one of his students to consider a finger pointed at the Moon. As the student closely examines Lee's finger, Lee slaps him on the head and says, "Don't concentrate on the finger, or you'll miss all that heavenly glory." For this installment, let me turn Lee's statement around: Don't concentrate on the heavenly glory or you'll miss some...

Mathematicians like me find numbers in almost everything we do. Last night, the key number was 11 — a simple count of the number of Geminid meteors I saw while observing for 1 hour centered around the shower's predicted peak at 2:45 A.M. CST. At first glance, that doesn't sound like many. Meteor expert Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute predicted the Geminid shower would peak at a zenithal hourly rate (ZHR) of 130 +/- 20 meteors...

Today marks 34 years since Apollo 17's Eugene Cernan became the last astronaut to tread on the Moon's surface. He and Harrison H. Schmitt, the first scientist on the Moon, landed on the lunar surface December 11, 1972. The lunar module took off from the Moon December 14, 2006, and the astronauts returned to Earth on the 19th. Besides lunar strolls, Neil Armstrong and Cernan — the first and last person to do so respectively — have...

On Wednesday afternoon at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, the Planetary Society announced a major award for "asteroid tagging." The $50,000 prize will be awarded to the winner of the Society's Apophis Mission Design Competition , which asks participants to submit designs for a mission that could rendezvous with and "tag" a near-Earth asteroid (NEO) that could collide with Earth. According to the Society...

Astronomers at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco are debating predictions of what the next solar cycle, number 24, which will start next year and will peak in 2011, will be like. Ironically, with new techniques to analyze solar cycles and with more observations than ever before, solar physicists are predicting a wider range of possibilities than ever before. As astronomer Bill Murtagh of NOAA's Space Environment Center says...