Emily of The Planetary Society posted a beautiful video showing what it would look like if the Earth had rings like Saturn. Absolutely beautiful!

Just a link to a fascinating analysis of why finding other human-habitable planets is Very Difficult Indeed.

Charlie’s Diary: How habitable is the Earth?.

And a neat picture of the History of the Earth, thanks to Wikipedia.

Very cool:
NASA - Hubble Space Telescope Captures Rare Jupiter Collision

bill zeman’s rockets are amazing. Beautiful woodworking, beautiful design.

(Hat tip to Cory Doctorow for pointing me to Bill and his daughter’s “Tiny Art Director” blog, which is also awesome.)

This video is completely awesome.
Thanks to Bad Astronomy for the pointer!

                                    <p><a href='http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nasa_embarks_on_epic_delay'>NASA Embarks On Epic Delay | The Onion - America's Finest News Source</a>.</p>

Poor NASA—spaceflight is hard, and bureaucracy makes it harder. But, in more fun news, there are two shuttles out right now! Endeavor is standing by to rescue Atlantis if it is damaged on its mission to repair Hubble. They were both briefly visible (with their service structures pulled back) this weekend.

Astronomy Picture of the Day has this pinhole camera image of the sun over 6 months. Exposures like this are called “solargraphs”, and the instructions for making the camera out of an aluminum can are here.

So very cool.

Astronomy Picture of the Day has a four-minute movie today. It’s an incredibly beautiful sequence of time-lapse pictures of the sky, the sun, clouds, the moon, stars, planets, and satellites.

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.

In honor of the 400th anniversary of the invention of the telescope, and the 40th anniversary of our first landing on an alien world, 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. Start your celebration inside by watching the video, and then go out and look at the sky!

The Boston Globe’s Big Picture feature is neat. (Thanks to my favorite Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait, for the link to the volcano pictures, which got the RSS feed into my newsreader!)

But even better than volcanoes is volcanoes on Io:

The rest of the Jupiter pictures are also fantastic.

There’s been too much complaining on this blog recently, at least from me. But I have good news! Finally, I can indulge my desire to watch Martian weather.

The Mars Express Visual Monitoring Camera isn’t a scientific instrument—no pointing control, no focus adjustment, only “basic exposure controls”—but it was included on Mars Express to monitor the ejection of the Beagle 2 lander in December 2003. The camera performed well—the lander didn’t. In 2007, ESA turned the camera back on to capture low-resolution images of Mars, including some neat crescent shots and global images that the scientific instruments and other satellites aren’t positioned to capture. They did tests and focusing all throughout 2007, and the “Mars Webcam”, as it’s been nicknamed, went live today.

This is way cool. Also, it’s a live satellite that can be used to train ops engineers: “VMC activites are unique in that the camera is operated by the Flight Control Team, and not a team of scientists. This gives operations engineers, particularly junior members, a chance to learn and practice command generation, planning, and other skills normally done at the Science Operations Centre.”

This is going right up with the VolcanoCam(1) on my list of things to go in my virtual windowframe(2).

(1) OMG, the VolcanoCam is now in HD! I love the USDA Forest Service. (2)And thanks to Ryan Hoagland for putting up a website that I could link to when I wanted to explain what I meant by virtual window. Wherever and whomever you are, Ryan, you rock.