The Fossil Record

Earth lights at night

NASA photo

Click on the image to see a bigger version!

Discovery in orbit

We got to watch the space shuttle chase the Space Station into orbit last night in the sky over south Texas. It looked like a giant shooting star.

The shuttle was carrying a crew of astronauts who will be staying at the Space Station. Five spacewalks are planned once they get there, which will be the most ever conducted while a shuttle is docked at the station.

To read all the latest news about the International Space Station, see NASA's Space Station page.

Here's a great video from a "rocket cam" of an older Discovery launch that shows just how fast the ship travels:

Lunar eclipse!

Be there, or be square!

Tomorrow morning's total eclipse of the moon
will be visible from the United States,
Canada, South America, the Pacific Ocean
and even western Asia and Australia.

Check out NASA's Eclipse page to learn more.

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(NASA diagram)
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Ground control

It's a good thing much of Texas is pretty flat. That means I didn't have to worry about trying to make it up steep mountains when we took a tour of The Johnson Space Center this past weekend!

I have to admit though, I was feeling pretty nostalgic when the Space Center tram operators led us to the Mission Control room where I took this picture. When I was a little girl, we used to get to go to assemblies at school to watch the moon landings on TV when they were broadcast. They were very exciting. The actual control room they used in those days (way, way back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth) is now a historic landmark, according to the tour guide. In fact, each personal computer you see in the picture above has more computer power than was available to all of the Gemini space missions! The tour guide explained that today's personal computer was originally built as a flight moniter for the Apollo spacecraft.

This new Mission Control room is used to maintain contact between Houston, Moscow, and the International Space Station.

That space station is now orbiting the earth at a phenomenal speed of 17,500 miles per hour! This means the astronauts on the space station see 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every 24 hours.

Talk about jet lag!

NASA also has a big model of the space station which is used to help train astronauts on how to walk, work and live in space:

There are platforms between the station units that are like big air hockey tables, simulating what it feels like to move around while in super speedy orbit.

I got a little sick to my stomach just thinking about swirling around out in the atmosphere, but after I tasted the freeze-dried space ice cream in the gift shop, I started thinking this astronaut job might not be so bad.

The McDonald Observatory

When my Junior Scientist and I took a little trip out to west Texas during spring break, I had every intention of showing him the Hobby-Eberly telescope up close and in person. But when we left the motor lodge in Fort Davis one beautiful Saturday morning and proceeded up the narrow, windy, 17-mile road from our hotel through the Davis Mountains to the McDonald Observatory, I got more than a little nervous.

The huge, shiny-white dome that houses the telescope sits like a king's crown on the peak of one of the mountains, looking almost like it might roll off any minute. It's an amazing sight to see. From its perch on the mountain, it is in a perfect position to take in the "big Texas skies," and the endless number of stars they hold. As we got within only about 4 miles of the observatory, the road curved sharply over a steep cliff. My hands sweated and slipped on the stearing wheel, and my fear of heights (an evolutionary survival mechanism, in my opinion) kicked in. I couldn't make it up the rest of the way!

I turned around and came back down, but I'm a chicken, and plenty of other people easily make it up to see the Hobby-Eberly and several other telescopes at McDonald every day. When they arrive at the summit, they get a chance to learn about all kinds of cool space stuff. The Hobby-Eberly telescope is the fourth largest optical telescope in the world! The primary mirror of the enormous telescope is the largest of its kind ever constructed. Most of the time, only a small bit of the mirror's capacity is even needed to gather a vast amount of light from the sky. The observatory also hosts weekly star parties where people gather from all around, share their telescopes and have fun learning about astronomy.

To learn more about how this technological marvel was built, take a peek at this Gallery, which has pictures of each phase of the "HET" construction.

Also, be sure to check this out: the Observatory is now hosting a Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment project, which means it houses a small but powerful robotic telescope that looks for the light of deep-space explosions called Gamma-Ray Bursts.

Now, that's far out!

Get out your telescopes!

It has been almost 2 1/2 years since the last time this happened, but there will be a total lunar eclipse tomorrow night, March 3, starting at 4:30 pm Eastern Standard Time, or just before sunset. When the sky gets dark in the east, you will be able to see it.

A full moon lunar eclipse happens when the moon passes through the shadow of the earth, so it is not as bright as it usually is. Some reflected sunlight will still reach the moon though, and in many parts of the world, it will glow a coppery red color. The shadow of the earth will also be visible on the moon.

The best view for North America of this month's eclipse, which will last for about an hour and fourteen minutes (a long time for the moon to be dark), will be in the eastern half of the continent. The midwest will get a partial view of the eclipse, but if you live out west, you might have to miss out on this one.

Here's a photo of what different phases of the 2004 eclipse looked like, from Austin, Texas:

Photo by Russell Croman

For more very cool information about the March 3rd eclipse, visit

NASA's Eclipse Home Page