A NASA panel has just released a detailed report revealing the last moments of the space shuttle Columbia and its seven-member crew, lost February 1, 2003, on reentry. You can download the 400-page report, “Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report." The cause of the accident has been clear since soon after the disaster: A piece of insulating foam struck the leading edge of one of the orbiter’s wings. During reentry, searing hot gases entered...

Here is the transcript for my podcast about how to see Mercury, Rigel, and globular cluster M79 . Check out the Astronomy.com's interactive star chart to see an accurate map of your sky. It'll help you locate some of this week's key targets. Astronomy magazine subscribers have access to a slew of cool functions with StarDome PLUS. Each week, I highlight three different night-sky targets for you to see: One object you can find with your...

On January 4, I’ll leave the cold, snowy Midwest for the sunny (and mid-60s) Southern California (Long Beach, to be exact). Just that alone sounds great, but I’m not heading out there for a vacation. Instead I’ll be in California for the 213th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting . The January AAS meeting is the largest astronomy-related conference each year. About 2,300 astronomers are expected, and they will present more than 1,800 scientific...

Over the past few months, I have been in charge of selecting the weekly poll we put up on the main page of Astronomy.com , and it has given me some insight into our readers and those who visit our site. Here are five things I’ve learned so far: 1) Readers have high hopes for a jovian moon. When asked where they thought we might find extraterrestrial microbial life , voters thought we’ll have the most luck on Europa (37.5 percent of the votes). Mars...

In January 2009 world-renowned amateur astronomer and comet discoverer David H. Levy joins Astronomy magazine as a Contributing Editor. Levy will write a monthly column for the world’s most popular magazine on astronomy, which has a circulation of more than 125,000 monthly issues. Levy’s first column will appear in the June 2009 issue. Levy is most famous for discovering 22 comets over his long career, including the co-discovery of Comet Shoemaker...

On Christmas Day, 1758, a German amateur astronomer and farmer named Johann Georg Palitzsch did something that would have made a great Christmas gift for English astronomer Edmond Halley. Johann “recovered” Halley’s Comet, meaning he was the first to observe this previously observed “dirty snowball” as it returned to the inner solar system. Edmond Halley (1656-1742) calculated the orbit of the comet that now bears his name based on previous sightings...

Here is the transcript for my podcast about how to see the The Kids, Pazmino’s Cluster, and the Flaming Star Nebula . Check out the Astronomy.com's interactive star chart to see an accurate map of your sky. It'll help you locate some of this week's key targets. Astronomy magazine subscribers have access to a slew of cool functions with StarDome PLUS. Each week, I highlight three different night-sky targets for you to see: One object you...

Many phases of the Moon ago — more than 200 — I came under the spell of earth science and wrote a lot about it for a number of years. This week, some of that ancient knowledge came back to visit as I gazed at a fantastic 28-image mosaic of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. You may see crusty cracked ice; I see the outlines of ice continents. At the American Geophysicial Union meeting in San Francisco this week, the halls are abuzz with talk of plate tectonics...

Noted astrophotographer and Astronomy contributor John Chumack sent us a still image of the Geminid meteor shower, which peaked December 13/14. He shot the photo from his observatory in Dayton, Ohio. Read John’s comments below. My backyard observatory’s “Northeast Video Sky Camera” captured 10 of the brightest Geminid meteors — despite the very bright and big Full Moon, some fog, and high cirrus clouds — from around midnight until 3 a.m. EST Monday...

I just finished writing an article about the telescope’s history (you know, with the International Year of Astronomy coming up in 2009). I know that in the astronomy world aperture fever runs wild, but wow, some of these telescopes are just ginormous!! It must have been quite an experience just to operate something like the 72-inch “Leviathan of Parsonstown” — even though telescopes like the Yerkes 40-inch (pictured at right) and Lick 36-inch refractors...