That means if the weather holds in your area you can go outside and you will see the largest moon of the year. The event has a fancy technical name – a “perigee-syzygy,” but us common folk simply call it a “supermoon.” A supermoon occurs when a full moon happens within 12 hours of the lunar perigee. The perigee is the point when the moon is closest to the Earth.

You don’t have to fear that the moon being so close to the Earth will cause earthquakes or volcanoes. The worst we will experience is that people in the coastal areas will see a lower and higher tides than usual. Be on the lookout for the giant moon this weekend.

[via Space.com]

What that means is the camera is able to capture much more accurate photos of things such as “red hydrogen emission” nebula and other celestial bodies.

Like the standard EOS 60D, the Canon EOS 60Da camera has an 18MP CMOS sensor that is sharp and offers good contrast.  Its rear LCD is a three-inch clear view unit with 1,040,000-dot resolution. The display can flip out and is adjustable for angle making it easy to view no matter how positioned. The camera also ships with a stereo AV video cable output images directly to the TV screen for viewing, though it’s unclear if there’s an HDMI port or not. Given the fact that the 60D has HDMI, I’d expect the 60Da to include it as well.

The camera can handle ISO speeds up to 6400 – with the ability to expand to ISO 12800. It has nine different autofocus points, full manual controls, you can store images in RAW, JPEG, and RAW plus JPEG formats. An optional remote accessory is available for controlling longer exposure times. The camera MSRP is $1499, presumably for the body only and it will be available later this month. That’s more than $500 higher than a stock EOS 60D, so you’ll definitely want to wait for some reviews to come out before taking the plunge on this one.

Made by artist and photographer Mishka Henner, the width of each page in Astronomical represents a distance of 1 million kilometers (about 621,000 miles). Naturally it begins with the sun in the first two pages of volume 1. The rest of the books are nothing but blackness, interspersed with the planets where appropriate. The picture above shows the Earth – we’re on page 155 of volume 1. Meanwhile Pluto is on the 6,000th page of the set. Perhaps there are aliens lurking in the other pages.

This read-through really drives the point of the collection home:

Believe it or not, you can actually buy your own copy of Astronomical for your own bookshelf. Contact Mishka and he’ll gladly make you a whole set for £100 (~$157 USD). Honestly I think we just need the one set and any more would be a waste of paper, but that’s just my two cents.

[via io9 & CultureLab via Laughing Squid]

The orbiting hotel will hold seven people in four different cabins with room for a crew in there somewhere. The trip is far from cheap, so only the loaded space geek needs to apply. Visitors will get to the station on a Soyuz rocket, which will take two days and cost £500,000 (~$827,500 USD). Then, the five-day stay on the space hotel will cost another £100,000 (~$165,430). The good news is unlike the ISS, the visitors will get showers with water and good food.

The food won’t be out of tubes, it will be cooked on Earth. The food will head up on the rocket with the travelers and be heated in the microwave on the station.

Rooms will be fitted with cameras and binoculars to check out the Earth and other views of space. I think it would be really cool to visit this hotel, but I am betting it will never come to reality.

[via DailyMail]

Since the moon doesn’t spin, this is the only side we ever see. The “dark side” – correctly called the “far side” – of the moon is very different from the near side though. The far side of the moon is roughly 1.5 miles higher than the near side and it has mountains and valleys while the near side is mostly smooth.

Scientists and astronomers have often wondered why the two sides of the moon are so vastly differently. A new computer simulation has given way to the theory that our moon may in fact be the result of the collision of the moon with a much smaller moon about 750 miles in diameter early in the formation of our solar system. The thought is that the far side of the moon is what remains of the crust of the smaller moon that crashed into it, and that the front side is what remains of the larger moon.

[via MSNBC]

The scientists think that the surface of the star hovers around about 206 degrees F (97 degrees C). You could swim in that thing if you wanted. The star is estimated to have a mass of only 6 to 15 times that of Jupiter and is the smaller and dimmer member of a binary system with two brown dwarfs locked in a close orbit.

The star is so cold that the team that found it thinks that it might be possible the star has a watery atmosphere. Scientist using the Spitzer Space Telescope have found another brown dwarf that might be even colder. They think it may be only 30C on the surface so our pal CFBDSIR 1458 10b might not have the coldest title for long.

[via National Geographic]

You can see how things are going to go for Brown with the first question out of the gate: Wired: “How many planets are there?” Brown: “Just eight.” Wired: “Because you killed Pluto.” Brown: “Yes.” That’s funny stuff there. Brown sort of deserved it though; Wired asked who was the most upset about Pluto losing its planetary status. Brown quipped, “Astronomers on the New Horizons team, who sent a spacecraft to Pluto in 2006, are very unhappy. The thing their craft is going to is no longer a planet. It’s sort of fun to tease them about that.”

But the best part of the entire interview is this little tidbit, “What does your 5-year-old daughter think of having a planet-killer for a father,” asked the interviewer. Brown said, “She has learned from general discussions that I killed Pluto and that killing is bad. Therefore, I’ve done something bad, and so she’s kind of mad at me.”

I move that Brown heretofore be known as Mike “Death Star” Brown. Behold the power of this fully functional astronomer!

Read the full interview over at Wired.

[Image: Mathiaspedersen.com]

The planet could have entire mountains made from diamonds. The planet was discovered using the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope. According to Dr. Marek Kukula of London’s Royal Greenwich Observatory, “The planet is thousands of times fainter than the star it orbits. So the scientists have to perform an amazing feat of precision measurement to extract anything at all. The fact that they are able to tell us something about the composition of this particular planet is quite literally out of this world.”

The planet is known as Wasp 12b and the thought is that water ice may not have been abundant when the planet formed, leading to high concentrations of carbon. We may never know for sure since the planet is so far away – unless we find a Stargate.

[via BBC]

The conference charges $50 (USD) per person. Are you kidding me? I’m not going to pay $50 just to listen to some – wait, the $50 includes a free lunch. Hmmm. I think I’ll pass for now, maybe I’ll just get a GWW license plate frame. Because I too, believe that Galileo Was Wrong. Clearly, our cat is the center of the universe. And it wants food now. I have to go.

[via Boing Boing]

The Chemist shirt would have been much better if the ladies in it looked better.

Now there’s a sad geek shirt. You know what makes it worse? One Pluto year is equivalent to 248 Earth years, but Pluto was a planet for only 76 Earth years. What? You don’t think that’s sad? I don’t care.

Shirt with G.I. Joe-ish font ftw! I know the message has a kind of anti-geek twist, but it’s still awesome.

The Pi versus i shirt succeeds in making Math fun!

And I think the T-800 Bach shirt is a fitting way to end this post. I actually can’t decide if it’s funny or not because it’s such an old joke, but… Yeah it’s still funny.

The Hoshizora Navi (roughly Sky Navigator) cartridge contains a positional sensor that follows your movements and the DS, and the software will update the screen as you move, to reflect your current view of the sky and stars. The app is packed with information, too, with a dictionary of terms, guides to our sun and moon, thousands of stars and various constellations. Nor are you limited to the current sky; the app allows you to view any sky between the years 1900 and 2099. That’s the future, folks… but it doesn’t come cheap: Hoshizora Navi sports a hefty price tag at ¥8,190 (more than $90 US). That’s how they’re adding a “gaming” aspect to the software: it’s so pricey that you’ll have to go on some sort of crazy money-finding adventure just to buy the thing.

[Official site via DSF]

The 10-inch tall projector uses a bright green laser and other holographic tricks to create a panorama of thousands of stars. The stars and clouds are constantly changing, creating a truly unique visual effect. When placed properly in your room, its beam is wide enough to cover several walls and an entire ceiling (in a small room). There’s also an option to turn adjust the intensity (or turn off) simulated blue vapor clouds, completing the effect. The Laser Stars Projector is available now for around $180.