Norfolk astronomer Mark Thompson ready for the return of BBC's Stargazing Live It's been a stellar year for Mark Thompson and it's set to be just as heavenly in 2012. The success of BBC2's Stargazing Live event last January has led to another three-night series this month which Mark will again help to...
The University of Arizona's Catalina Sky Survey has been awarded a $3.16 million NASA grant to continue its search for near-Earth objects, or NEOs, through 2012. Under the direction of Stephen M. Larson of the UA's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, the survey, known as CSS, has discovered about 70 pe...
Oklahoma Fireball 13 Jan, 4:13 AM Short but bright fireball west of Oklahoma City with good radar scatter audio. It was either in the main beam of the USAF Kickapoo Texas space radar transmitter, or had enough electron density to reflect eve...
Possible meteorite discovered in Castro Valley back yard It wasn't exactly pennies from heaven, but if the smouldering, dark-coloured rock discovered on Mitch Medeiros' property did indeed fall from the sky, it may fetch the 55-year-old a fortune. If, that is, it's a verifiable meteorite. Whate...
Meteor flashes through Edmonton sky Did you see that ball of white that flew through the sky Friday morning? Our newsroom was getting calls, emails, and tweets from listeners, and some are convinced they saw a meteor at around 7:30am. There have been reported sightings from Thorsby to Gibbons to Mun...
The 1907 Kingston earthquake which shook the capital of the island of Jamaica with a magnitude of 6.5 on the moment magnitude scale on Monday January 14th, at about 3:30 pm local time (21:36 UTC), was considered by many writers of that time one of the world's deadliest earthquakes recorded in history...
Shannon Matilda Wells Lucid (born January 14, 1943) is an American biochemist and a NASA astronaut. At one time, she held the record for the longest duration stay in space by an American, as well as by a woman. She has flown in space five times including a prolonged mission aboard the Mir space station....
Patrick Moore Medal to recognise outstanding astronomy teachers The Council of the Royal Astronomical Society have agreed to create a new Medal to recognise oustanding teachers of astronomy. The Patrick Moore Medal is named after the broadcaster Sir Patrick Moore, one of the world's most famous...
Oxford University professor Steven Rawlings found dead A man who was found dead in a bungalow was an Oxford University professor, police have revealed. Steven Gregory Rawlings, 50, was found at the home in Oxfordshire on Wednesday night. He was Official Fellow and Tutor in Physics of St Peter's Col...
Astronomers Release an Unprecedented Data Set on Variability of Celestial Objects An example of a star that flares occasionally. This is a so-called dwarf nova, a binary star system where a material flows from a red giant star to a compact, dense white dwarf companion, and sometimes causes major e...
Updated website for astronomica.co.uk After a great few years on the net, it was finally time for our old website to retire. So, we decided to start the new year with the launch of our new website. To celebrate this, we're giving everyone a 25% discount on every purchase, until midnight on Sunday 22nd...
A near Earth object spotted from the OSF ? At 02:30UT (11:30 local chilean time), a couple of the astronomers on duty at the ALMA control room spotted this strange and fuzzy object outside. It was fuzzy just like a comet. Brightness was about t...
An Arianespace Soyuz 2-1a rocket with a a Fregat upper stage is scheduled to launch six Globalstar mobile communication satellites (#13-18) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, at 17:09 GMT, 28th December, 2011.