Bad Astronomy

On January 9, 2012, astronauts on the International Space Station took this amazing footage of the moon setting behind the Earth's limb. Air near t...

In my weekly Q & BA live video chat session on Google+, I answer the question, "What would happen to the human body exposed to the vacuum and cold ...

In my weekly Q & BA live video chat session on Google+, I answer the question, "What's the best way to get kids into science and skepticism?".

I'm...

This is the complete (1 hr) Q&BA live video chat session I did on January 29, 2012. I talk about spending money on NASA, exobiology, what happens ...

[SET THIS TO HD!]

More info about this video is on my blog (goes live Sunday at 13:00 UTC): http://blogs.discovermagazi......

Blog post with LOTS more info: http://blogs.discovermagazi...

On January 2...

On January 23, 2012 at about 04:00 UTC, the Sun unleashed a powerful flare and coronal mass ejection - huge explosions that drive hundreds of milli...

This is the complete Q&BA session I did on Google+ Hangouts on January 22, 2012. I answered questions from viewers about Mars Curiosity, comets, da...

On January 15, 2012, the Russian spacecraft Phobos-Grunt re-entered over the Pacific ocean and burned up. During this time, I reported the event li...

George Hrab and I watching an air shark in the lobby of a hotel at Dragon*Con 2011, and making Jaws jokes.

You read that right.

Sorry about the a...

On October 29, 2011, a Progress resupply capsule undocked from the International Space Station, de-orbited, and burned up in the atmosphere. This s...

I took images from NASA's Cassini Saturn probe and put them together to make an animation of the giant moon Titan slipping behind the tinier, icy m...

The Cassini spacecraft has been used to make a global multicolor map of Saturn's giant moon Titan -- bigger than Mercury! -- for the first time. De...

On September 25, 2011, the Sun blew off an M-class flare with a prominence that blew well off the solar surface before falling gracefully back down...

On October 1, 2011, a comet screamed into the Sun and presumably disintegrated. A few minutes later, the Sun erupted in a big blast of magnetic ene...

On Saturday, September 24 at 09:40 UT, the Sun blasted out a powerful flare. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory too images in the ultraviolet, which...

Hundreds of pictures of Earth, each taken at about 06:00 local time, show the terminator - the day/night line - over the course of one year. The Ea...

Seismometers from the EarthScope project Transportable Array measured the up-and-down motion of the ground from the magnitude 5.9 earthquake that o...

Scientists using sound waves to probe the interior of the Sun (in much the same way seismic waves can be used to peer inside the Earth) have now de...

I was at a picnic recently, and at sunset a gorgeous rainbow appeared in the sky. Well, just the base of it, but still. It really was pretty, but w...

On August 4 at 03:57 UT, the Sun's surface exploded with an M9.5 flare, somewhat more energetic than the one earlier this week. It also blew out a ...

This animation uses images from the Dawn spacecraft of the asteroid Vesta, showing this 500 km wide rock spinning.

Blog post with more info: http:...

On July 30, 2011 at 02:00 UTC a sunspot erupted on the Sun, giving off a brief but powerful class M9 flare. The first segment shows it at 33.5 nano...

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this amazing footage of a solar prominence gracefully erupting from the Sun's surface. It's taken in the...

On July 10, 2011, the Space Shuttle Orbiter Atlantis did a 360-degree pitch - a flip end-over-end - so astronauts on the space station could inspec...

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught a comet passing directly in front of the Sun, the first time this has ever been seen. This is not a perspe...

While out biking on June 9, 2011, I spotted this turtle lumbering across the bike trail (which separates two small ponds). He (she?) crawled over a...

The Sun let loose with an enormous explosion on the morning of June 7, 2011. The entire eruption was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory....

GOES satellite data show severe storms erupting over the southeastern U.S. in late April, 2011. A warm, moist arm mass collided with a cold mass, c...

This is a composite animation showing the Sun as seen by two imagers on NASA's SDO satellite. One sees X-rays, where the Sun's magnetic field domin...

On March 19, 2010, the Sun erupted, launching a billion tons of plasma toward the Earth in an event called a coronal mass ejection. The STEREO A sa...

Asteroid 2011 GP59 is an irregular rock that spins. When we see it side-on it's bright, and end-on it dims. This video is made of 137 separate 30 s...