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...

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...