Recently, I noticed that the different font rendering under Windows 7 broke the layout of the top menu on this blog a little bit – this never bothered me because I had no other operating systems than Windows XP on my computers before I got my new laptop! But because the layout was also a bit wonky under Android, I have fixed this now and also slightly overhauled the top menu. To make room for a long needed Science button, I made the plunge and changed the site logo to BIBRA.EU. This domain has been active for a while and already redirects to the blog, but next year I will move the whole site to the new address. Otherwise, everything is going to remain the same here for the time being, meaning that it’s still going to be my all-purpose blog for everything that does not fit into my other sites.

There’s also something else going on… I completely forgot to mention it here because I was so busy, but I have been building a new website for the WSH Crew Google+ Community this Summer! This means that the old Hangout Schedule Index which I had been maintaining here on the blog is now a part of the new website, but apart from some major layout improvements it is still the same page administrated by yours truly in cooperation with the other WSH Crew admins Nancy Graziano, Hugo Burnham, Silvan Wespi and Jim Meeker. The WSH Crew Community is also the reason I don’t write as much about science and astronomy here on this site at the moment, since we are posting all the interesting news over there, but I will probably still write the occasional article now and then. For everything else, go and join the WSH Crew Community – it’s a nice and cozy place and in addition to lots of space news we always keep everyone updated about which hangouts are happening.

So the changes here are actually not very earth-shattering, but at least I got around to work on the site a little bit. Maybe there will be more improvements along the way sometime!

This blog post comes a little late, although I had shared the news on the social media channels before: CosmoQuest has been saved! After the citizen science project had lost its primary NASA funding in October 2014 after having been hit with the sequestration before, it was held alive by donations, among them the very successful Hangoutathon from this spring, but even the most generous donations only go so far. Because of this, CosmoQuest director Pamela Gay has been tirelessly writing proposals to replace the lost NASA grant and on September 25, she got the news everbody involved in CosmoQuest had been waiting for: WE GOT FUNDING.

This is the good news – CosmoQuest will receive NASA funding for at least five years, but it is not exactly clear how much yet. On September 25, NASA had announced that 27 organisations, among them CosmoQuest, have been selected as Science Education Partners for STEM Agreements – altogether, a sum of $42 Million will be given out, but how this is going to be distributed is still in the future. If it would be divided equally, each grant applicant would get about $1.5 Million, which does not seem much over five years, but it would certainly be a windfall for CosmoQuest, which has been surviving on a few ten thousands for more than a year. The bottom line is that this is not about simply spending money but about giving scientists a chance to do research and support education – and scientists are humans like everyone else who need to be paid for their work. Other bills have to be paid too, of course – but this is all about the people doing the science.

While everyone waits for more details to come out, there is always more citizen science to do on CosmoQuest – there are still other worlds to map, especially Mars! And Pamela Gay has also hinted that there may be another CosmoQuest Hangoutathon sometime – but with less begging and more science. Let’s see what the future brings… it already looks pretty good now and I think CosmoQuest can really celebrate its fourth Birthday on January 1, 2016!

This is another edition of my now regular articles about the crew changes on the International Space Station – so much has happened since I posted the last one back in July and not all  of it was good. With the loss of a Dragon freighter at the end of June the third supply flight in a row had not reached the ISS, causing some major concern – but since then both a Progress transporter and a Japanese HTV have arrived without problems and both SpaceX and Orbital/ATK are working hard on returning to flight soon. On a more positive note, the first space-grown vegetable was served on the ISS and there was also a successful spacewalk by Russian cosmonauts. The crisis seems to be mostly over, but in September it is going to get very crowded on the station.   

It’s that time of year again – the Perseid Meteor Shower Lottery is upon us! Will we see some meteors, or a LOT of meteors? Or will the curse strike us again? This year, we don’t have the almost-full Moon making things worse and the weather might even play along in our location here in Midwest Germany. The Perseids will peak on August 12 in the early Evening CEST, so the night from the 12th to the 13th will probably be the best chance to look for meteors, but generally the few days around the peak date are usually good too.

It looks like we might at least be able to watch, because it isn’t so unseasonably cold at night like last year, but there is some light cloud cover that might get in the way. Although I have a new camera this year, I’m not sure I will be able to catch meteors with it – but if the sky is clear, I might try it. The only time I ever caught a Perseid meteor was in 2008 – I’ve been using that particular photo for all my Perseid posts.

[Update 8/16: The weather has now completely turned and there is no chance anymore of seeing the sky in the next days. We actually saw a tiny handful of shooting stars on the night of the 12th, which was a considerable improvement from the last year, but nowhere near the spectacle promised by the media!]

If your weather looks good and you want to try watching, here are the usual links: If you want to know more about the Perseids, Universe Today has a really good Observer’s Guide written by David Dickinson and Fraser Cain’s  short explainer video about meteors in general is also very recommended. In short, if you have a reasonably clear view of the sky to the east and northeast, you are all set to go! You don’t even need any fancy equipment, just your eyes are enough :-).

The last couple of days have been nothing short of amazing. Until only a week ago, Pluto had been literally just a small blob of pixels to humanity since its discovery eighty-five years ago by Clyde Tombaugh, but then New Horizons made its approach to the former planet. Even before the actual flyby, Pluto and its Moon Charon were transformed from pixels to detailed photos, which brought many surprises and some poignant visual allusions, like the now famous heart – which also looks like a certain dog! It’s been incredible and maybe the most exciting thing in uncrewed space exploration since the Voyager missions in the 70s and 80s!

Every time I write about The Infinite Monkey Cage, the brilliant science-comedy radio show from Brian Cox and Robin Ince, I begin with “I can’t believe I missed it again!” and this time will be no exception because I really hadn’t noticed that the first new episode has already been online since Monday! Those are the live shows that were recorded earlier this spring during their US tour, so they are going to be even livelier and sillier than before. There will be five more episodes, broadcast each Monday on BBC Radio 4 and afterwards the extended versions will be available on the web as usual – which is the better way to listen to the episodes.

Note that the podcast website has been completely revamped and although the runtime always says 30 minutes, these are still the extended podcast versions and not the truncated half-hour radio broadcasts. The archives have also now been extended to the previously unavailable series 1 and 2, so now you can download all the episodes from the beginning on or catch them with your favourite podcasting software on your phone or tablet. And of course there’s also the wonderfully funny title song for the series that Eric Idle recorded some time ago!

I can only highly recommend this show – Brian Cox and Robin ince are utterly funny and their guests are always fantastic. Besides, it’s even educational, despite most shows ending up somewhere completely different than they originally started – but that’s just the fun of it. As usual, major English listening skills and a healthy curiosity about science are required, but it’s actually quite easy to listen to. And, of course, if you like Brian Cox and/or Robin Ince, you’re in for a very special treat. (Note: I wrote the last paragraph for the previous posts about the series, but why write something new when there’s something perfectly okay available to recycle?)

I feel somewhat obligated to at least post one article about the New Horizons mission, because next to the Rosetta and Philae comet landing the Pluto flyby is easily the most exciting thing happening in space exploration this year. I’m not even going to attempt reporting about the mission in detail because I’m not a journalist, but instead I will try to make some recommendations where you can find the best journalism and information about New Horizons.

But what’s so exciting about Pluto? It isn’t even a planet anymore! That’s what I often hear from people not really familiar with what’s going on in space exploration. The answer is relatively easy: because we (as in humanity) have not been there yet! The Grand Tour of the solar system, which was proposed in the mid-1960s, could have gone to all the planets and much more, but politics slashed the budgets to such an extend that this one-in-a-lifetime planetary alignment opportunity fell to the Voyager Program, which amounted only to a light version of the tour. When it came to decide whether to send Voyager 1 to Pluto or to Titan, the decision was made in favour of the former – and Pluto remained unexplored for almost 40 years. In the meantime, Pluto has even lost its planethood status due to all the new discoveries in its vicinity…

Enter New Horizons – which has a quite a history itself. I recommend the very good Wikipedia Page of the mission for further details, but now on to a collection of links and tips where to get all the current and always up-to-date information about the flyby, which will happen next Tuesday, July 14th, at exactly 11:49:57 UTC. The first brief transmission after the flyby will be only happen late Tuesday and the first new images will be downlinked on Wednesday – Emily Lakdawalla has a must-read, detailed article about what to expect before and after the flyby. But New Horizons has already been busy observing Pluto sending back lots of amazing photos – and had even almost given the scientific community a heart attack by going into safe mode briefly. But everything is fine now and Tuesday’s historic encounter will happen no matter what. Here are the most important links and people to follow:

• New Horizons Main Site – This is the official mission website.
• New Horizons NASA Site – The NASA website for the mission.
• New Horizons Press Kit – An extensive 42-page press kit from NASA
• New Horizons LORRI Images – All images from the Long Range Reconnaisance Imager
• New Horizons Youtube Channel – All the video series and hangouts of the mission.
• DSN Now – Realtime activity data of the Deep Space Network, useful for checking if NH is transmitting
• Emily Lakdawalla from the Planetary Society is one of the best sources for NH.
• Universe Today has less breaking news, but more in-depth articles.

The real action will happen on Twitter, though – here are the important accounts to follow:

• New Horizons – The official NH Twitter feed directly from Alan Stern.
• New Horizons NASA – NH Twitter feed from NASA, mainly retweets from other accounts.
• Alan Stern –  NH’s Principal investigator.
• Joel Parker – NH’s Co-investigator.
• Kimberly Ennico Smith – Deputy Project Scientist
• Cathy Olkin – Deputy Project Scientist
• Alex Parker – Planetary astronomer working on the NH mission
• Kelsi Singer – Postdoc on the NH team
• Simon Porter – Scientist working on the NH mission
• Jason Cook – Planetary astronomer working on the NH mission
• Amy Shira Teitel – Embedded in the NH media team and making Pluto in a Minute!
• Emily Lakdawalla – Breaking news from the Planetary Society writer and blogger.
• New Horizons Bot – Automatically tweets new images from New Horizons.

I put all of the above into a Twitter List and I also recommend my larger Science & Astronomy and Spaceflight lists, which will probably full of Pluto and New Horizons soon. And because the Weekly Space Hangout and Astronomy Cast are both on summer break right now, have a look at the WSH Crew Google+ Community, where we will discuss and post the latest space and science news! And I think that’s all for now – good luck New Horizons!

After so many successful launches, it was particularly sad to see a SpaceX rocket blow up. That is what unfortunately happened yesterday about two and a half minutes after the Falcon 9 with the Dragon transporter on board had initially launched successfully, but shortly before the first stage separation something went catastrophically wrong and the rocket exploded in a huge cloud of smoke. This would have been the eighth successful launch of a Dragon transporter to the International Space Station by SpaceX and a complete failure is what nobody had really expected at this point. The video of the launch is actually hard to watch because it seemed like a picture-perfect liftoff in the beginning.

This is another edition of my now regular articles about the crew changes on the International Space Station – this one comes a bit sooner than expected because there has been some slight reshuffling and delays of the crew rotation. After the failed launch of a Progress transporter at the end of April all plans were off, but soon after the situation somewhat stabilized and apart from an actually very welcome extension of Expedition 42/43 everything seems to be back on track now. Tomorrow three Astronauts will return to Earth after a surprisingly long stay of six and a half months, while their replacements will only arrive about six weeks later. As usual, I just like to keep an overview of who is up in space and I hope to continue these articles – the next one may be due in Autumn, but who knows what will happen next!

It’s Towel Day again today, the annual celebration of all things Douglas Adams and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This year, I’ll do a repost of last year’s articles with some additions – head over to DVDLog to read the painstakingly translated review of the 1981 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy televisison series, which was actually a lot of fun to revisit and update, because it’s not only a disc review, but partly the history of the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself. And this year I even have the translated article about the 2005 movie incarnation ready, which was still missing last time because I wasn’t able to get it readyyet.

Last Spring, I missed something great – the cast of the Hitchhiker’s Guide Radio Series had been on tour with a live show, but there was a 75-minute live radio broadcast on BBC4 from the whole gang. I was really disappointed that I missed it, but recently it surfaced on Youtube in somewhat suboptimal quality, but it’s still immensly enjoyable.

Last year I’ve been poking around Youtube and foundsome great Douglas Adams treasures out there, which I have put together in a little playlist (which only suffered one minor deletion casualty in the last year). There are several great documentaries and even the rare South Bank show which I originally saw in dubbed version somewhen in the early 1990s on German television. You can actually find the television and radio series somewhere if you search for them, but I’m not linking to it because the Youtube uploads have a really bad image quality compared to the DVD and, of course, because of copyright reasons. Buy the DVD! It’s not like it still costs 30 bucks like it did twelve years ago.

And last year there was something which Douglas Adams would have really liked: ISS Expedition 42 was wishing everybody a Happy Towel Day – and  “thanks” to a failed Progress freighter launch, Samantha Cristoforetti, Terry Wirts and Anton Shklaperov are actually still on the ISS right now because their stay has been extended a couple of weeks. Will they remember Towel Day? Yes, the did! Samantha Cristoforetti has taken the time read a couple of pages from the first book on the ISS! Also, you can always check Samantha Cristoforetti’s Google+ Stream or my Twitter List of Astronauts currently on the space station for more.

So, Happy Towel Day everyone – it’s a very special one with Expedition 42 still in space!