Strider's Sci-Fi

The world as seen from space in HD; UrtheCast is mounting a couple of HD cameras on the ISS. And the UrtheCast partner, The Science Channel, will be using the video stream to create programming around. I think this channel is going to become my video wallpaper.

Over the years, Disney has done some of the best educational work ever assembled, translating complex concepts about science and history into forms we can all easily understand. This is one of my all time favorites from that collection, a story about the history of space science, and how we came to understand how it [...]

Most of us never get picked for astronaut training (in fact a few like me never get picked to play on a team of any kind), but for those who don’t, astronaut Jerry Carr got together with TED and produced this great little animation on the topic. This will introduce you to some of the [...]

This amazing moonrise video was made in a single take, with no stop motion, no compositing, and no CGI effects of any kind. After watching this I wasn’t terribly surprised to learn that the man who filmed it, Mark G, is a professional photographer with some really tasty optical gear. He got about two kilometers [...]

The APOD site at NASA, AKA the Astronomy Picture of the Day page, recently posted this 3D image of Helene, one of the Trojan Moons of Saturn. And yes, you will need to break out your red/blue glasses to see it properly. Helene is a tiny little thing measuring only 36 by 32 by 30 [...]

The NASA GRAIL mission has been flying for about a year, two satellites orbiting the Moon at low altitude to create a detailed gravity map of our nearest neighbor. The project has been a total success, generating all kinds of new knowledge on the current density over different parts of the surface which can lead [...]

The Geminid Meteor Shower is under way once more, with peak viewing over the next 2 nights, the 13th and 14th. You can get some great viewing tips here or at the first link. What makes the Geminids stand out is their frequency; with up to 100 meteors per hour, they are one of the [...]

Over at the Albert Einstein Planetarium this afternoon there will be a presentation explaining (in very simple terms) how we can take a huge amount of raw data out of any one of our observatories and turn it into an actual understanding of how the Universe works. Converting that data into quantitative science (things we [...]

Astrophysicist Geoffrey Marcy has managed to discover more extrasolar planets than anyone else, 70 out of the first 100 in fact. He also is the director of the Center for Integrative Planetary Science, an entire organization dedicated to extrasolar planet research. So it shouldn’t be any surprise he has received a grant to study the [...]

The Air and Space Museum has a couple of nice presentations they have put together about how Hollywood has approached showing what going into space will look like over the years. On the Rocket Pioneers page they have a list of early rocket scientists, pretty much the men who invented the entire concept of using [...]