Best known to astronomical trivia buffs as the man who coined the term “black hole,” University of Texas physicist John A. Wheeler died this morning at the age of 96. Wheeler “was legendary for his way with words, coining such terms as wormholes, quantum foam, black holes, and the wave function of the universe,” writes Wheeler’s former student and current University of Chicago physicist Daniel Holz over at Cosmic Variance . Wheeler’s scientific resume...

On Saturday, March 22, friends and family bid farewell to science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who died March 19 at his home in Sri Lanka. Best known for the novel and screenplay 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Clarke wrote fiction that often juxtaposed themes as audacious as humanity’s destiny with prophetic visions of coming technology. Little wonder that his work influenced generations of scientists and engineers. “All of us who have been entertained...

There’s no better place to find astronomy related software than the web archive created by Astro Events Group of Ostend, Belgium. “Our compilation will actually never be complete,” says Patrick Jaecques, a member of the group. “We have updates about every week. It’s also the only part of our Dutch web site that is translated into French, German and English.” There you’ll find hundreds of programs for a wide variety of computing environments, including...

Yesterday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a nice summary of efforts by the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee to detect gravitational waves. The article focuses on NEMO , the $1.8 million, 1,560 CPU, Beowulf-class computing cluster built and operated by the school’s gravitational-wave group. (Ah, I love that kind of talk.) NEMO was commissioned in 2006. Since then, it’s been chugging through data produced by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational...

Until now, I couldn’t tell you about one exhibit I saw at January’s American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting. The embargo lifted yesterday, when Microsoft announced its WorldWide Telescope project at the TED2008 conference in Monterey, California. Imagine terabytes of astronomical imagery, ranging across the spectrum from radio waves to X-rays, seamlessly integrated and available in an easy-to-use interface. Pan left, right, up, down. Zoom in,...

One of the pleasures of attending American Astronomical Society meetings is strolling through a sea of poster papers. A poster paper is exactly what it sounds like — it’s an oversized page that summarizes the results of a single study. Now and then, you spot displays where the science comes mixed with whimsy. Such is the case with “Discovery and Interpretation of an X-ray Period in the Galactic Center Source CXOGC J174536–2856,” a study led by Valerie...

On Wednesday, at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas, Google engineering director Andrew Moore introduced a new version of the company’s Sky application in Google Earth. Of particular interest to me is the inclusion of historical star maps from the ginormous collection of David Rumsey at Cartographic Associates. He’s amassed some 150,000 maps of Earth and sky. Google Earth added the first terrestrial maps November 2006. Now...

I was checking out the exhibitors at this week’s American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas, and trying hard to avoid information overload. The booth for the Pan-STARRS project stopped me in mid-stride. In fact, I may have actually done a double-take. There, a giant poster of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) formed the booth’s backdrop. Only this wasn’t a poster. It was an image taken with the 1.4-billion-pixel charge-coupled-device camera on...

Okay, it’s the wrong season, but bear with me. Easter eggs, at least the software kind, are everywhere — from a hidden menu in a DVD to an obscure demo in an application program . In the software game, some rules apply as to what legitimately can be called an Easter egg. They can’t be documented or obvious, they must be reproducible by any user performing the right combination of actions, and they must be entertaining. I've gone down this road...

One place I’ve always wanted to visit is Antarctica. It’s a continent seemingly designed for science geeks and natural-history buffs. Here’s a sampling of scientists now scattered across the bleak landscape: Cosmologists tweak the 10-meter South Pole Telescope , just completed last February; geologists study volcanos and drill deep cores beneath the sea; glaciologists camp on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to study the interconnected rivers and lakes...