The announcement was made today that NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has found 7 rocky planets ranging in size and density from Mars to and a bit beyond Earth. All of them are potentially within liquid water orbital range of their sun, three of them permanently, and depending on the green house gasses composition of the atmospheres the other 4 of them may be. Now that they have located them, every orbital telescope we have is pointed in their direction, gathering data. The star they orbit is nothing like ours, but a tiny rather cool Red Dwarf, which means we have the possibility of habitable planets around many more stars than we used to believe. Of the videos here, the first is a short visual announcement, the second is the full announcement with Q+A broadcast earlier today, and the third is a 360 degree VR rendering to give you a feel for what it would look like from the surface of one of them.
The Irregular at Magic High School anime series has a Feature Film coming out in Japan on June 17th, and it just got its first trailer. The original voice cast is here, but both the director and the anime studio have changed since the original TV series came out in 2014. I have no idea how much those changes might change the dynamic of the story-line, but it was solid as a light novel, solid as a TV series, and I expect it will be solid as a movie. Thanks to the folks at Otaku USA for the heads up on this one.
Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei Movie PV by pKjd
We get a couple of very different movies this week. The gritty near future dystopia The Girl with All the Gifts, based on the novel by the same name from Mike Carey, is a story of spoor crazed zombies and human experimentation. On the other hand the fantasy Rock Dog is about a Tibetan Mastiff who wants to play music rather than guard sheep. I know which one I will be watching; how about you?
This week we get Doctor Who: The Return of Doctor Mysterio, a delightfully twisted look at comic book superheroes that may be my favorite Doctor Who Christmas Special. We also get the 2014 remake of the 1946 French classic La Belle Et La Bete or Beauty And The Beast, which one reviewer tagged as 50 Shades of Fur.
In Anime Noragami Season Two: Aragoto minor god Yato is still broke, still shrineless, and now fighting for his life as major war goddess Bishamon hunts him down. Even more life threatening, Assassination Classroom Season Two: Part One brings the next 13 episodes of this entertaining series. While I really like Asterisk War: The Academy City on the Water, the release of Blu Ray 3 puts 5 episodes on a disc and charges the price of a complete series for them, so I will stick to the streaming service version. Ultimate Otaku Teacher: Season One, Part Two brings the next dozen episodes of this humorous and offbeat slice-of-life for the socially inept home. Re-releases in more affordable bundles this week include Freezing Vibration: The Complete Second Season in an Anime Classics edition (generally around or just under $30), and Unbreakable Machine-Doll in a S.A.V.E. edition (generally right around $20). Machine Doll is the complete series plus the 6 OVAs, which make it a very good deal.
Hello Sleepwalkers has a new mini-album that came out this week, and the first track is the song Sundown from that release. After that is Rollin and New World, also both from the new release. They have another recent mini-album called Unplugged Demos full of acoustic tracks, but I couldn’t find any of them that had permission set to stream in North America.
The folks over at Universe Today have put together an eBook called 101 Astronomical Events in 2017, and made it absolutely free. It includes a lot of good skywatching events for the year, but the centerpiece of the observations is the Total Eclipse of the Sun that will take place on August 21st. That will be visible from the majority of the continental US and Canada, and should be quite the show. If you want to find out exactly what time it will be happening where you are, you can go to Xavier Jubier’s Interactive Solar Eclipse Map, and since it is fairly complex you may want to Read The Help File over at Eclipse2017.Org.