We’re one step closer to taking vacations in space, it seems, after Virgin Galactic showed off its latest launch vehicle Tuesday at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual AirVenture event in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Named WhiteKnightTwo but nicknamed Eve, the plane resembles the hull of a catamaran, with the space between its booms intended to carry the still-in-development SpaceShipTwo, and its paying customers, into space as early as 2011. (Presumably...

Each week, Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Michael Bakich , a master at explaining how to observe, posts a podcast about three objects or events you can see in the sky. In each episode, Michael highlights: One object you can see without any optical aid One object you can see with a small (4-inch) telescope One object you can see with at least an 8-inch telescope Targets for July 31-August 7, 2009 Binoculars: Small Sagittarius Star Cloud Small telescope...

Astronomy contributor John Chumack was finally able to capture the Jupiter impact site with his 10-inch telescope from his backyard in Dayton, Ohio. And he was nice enough to share an image and a Jupiter rotation movie with us. Below is how he put the video together: There was an incredible amount of work that went into this movie. I captured more than 51,820 useable frames, and each full color RGB set had at least 3,900 frames. Running through all...

Just in time to keep the Apollo 11 anniversary celebration from dying out, out comes a book called Moonfire . Though, calling it a book seems like kind of an understatement. Not content to simply reproduce Of a Fire on the Moon , Norman Mailer’s gripping contemporary account of the Moon landings, the publishers at Taschen also include some amazing pictures from LIFE magazine and NASA’s own archives. Many of these pictures have not been published or...

Now that the September 2009 issue of Astronomy is in-hand (or will be shortly), we’ve updated Astronomy.com with our newest web extras to give subscribers exclusive complementary information to the issue. Take a sneak peek inside the September 2009 Astronomy magazine . If you subscribe to Astronomy , make sure you’re registered with Astronomy.com so you can access these great extras. Here are this issue's highlights: Senior Editor Michael Bakich...

Along with the other 186 people on our ship, the Victoria Prince, I found myself reporting from China during our last week with very limited Internet capability. Thus, I could not send images with the final blog posts during the week of July 20. To make up for this, I am now posting a selection of images from the last week of the trip that includes shots of eclipse day . Enjoy! Previous post: We visit a Revolutionary Photo credit: David J. Eicher

In a twist on the amateur-astronomer-helps-professionals storyline, Yale astronomers discovered a group of galaxies by enlisting citizen scientists’ help not with stargazing, but computer gazing. The galaxies, dubbed the “Green Peas” because of their small, green appearance, were discovered as part of an online project called Galaxy Zoo , where volunteers have helped classify galaxies in a huge online picture gallery since 2007. Apparently the volunteers...

Here's my final blog from the China 2009 eclipse tour the Astronomy magazine editors have conducted, along with Melita Thorpe of MWT Associates. Sunday we travel to Shanghai, board a plane in the afternoon, and fly back to Chicago and then to Milwaukee. See all the images from Dave's tour in our solar eclipse 2009 trip gallery . This morning our group of 187, including Senior Editor Rich Talcott and his wife Evelyn, boarded buses in Nanjing...

Astronomy magazine contributor and longtime imager John Chumack had some luck spotting the new Jupiter impact site from his home in Dayton, Ohio, July 24, and he was nice enough to share his account with us: Even though the seeing sucked, and the sky was full of thick haze, I was able to capture the impact mark on Jupiter. I shot these images with my ToUcam PRO II webcam attached to my 6-inch f/8 cave reflector from my front driveway last night. Unfortunately...

It looks like gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) just became even more inscrutable. And that’s saying something for the brightest — and potentially most destructive — known objects in the universe. Even though it’s still a mystery just how these things work, scientists believed GRBs originated from a giant “fireball” made up of traditional matter, spewed out during black hole formation. But a recent paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (August 1, 2009...