A Quote by Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain



Telescopes are in some ways like time machines...
They reveal galaxies so far away that their light has taken billions of years to reach us. We in astronomy have an advantage in studying the universe, in that we can actually see the past. We owe our existence to stars, because they make the atoms of which we are formed. So if you are romantic you can say we are literally starstuff. If you're less romantic you can say we're the nuclear waste from the fuel that makes stars shine. We've made so many advances in our understanding. A few centuries ago, the pioneer navigators learnt the size and shape of our Earth, and the layout of the continents. We are now just learning the dimensions and ingredients of our entire cosmoc, and can at last make some sense of our cosmic habitat.



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Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Just a while ago... Endeavour docks at ISS

Early hours on Wednesday (12:06am EST), Endeavour docks at ISS.

Purpose of the mission: The STS-130 mission of space shuttle Endeavour will deliver a third connecting module - the Tranquility node - to the International Space Station and a seven-windowed cupola to be used as a control room for robotics.

Image above: (From left) Mission Specialist Nicholas Patrick, Pilot Terry Virts, Mission Specialists Robert Behnken and Kathryn Hire, Commander George Zamka and Mission Specialist Stephen Robinson. Image credit: NASA

Monday, February 8, 2010

Hubble takes pictures of Pluto


Our most distant planet Pluto gets photographed by Hubble. The photographs that you see is a set of many pictures taken by Hubble.