> get lamp

English Heritage will livestream the summer solstice sunset at Stonehenge, Saturday June 20 9:26 PM BST (1:26 PM PDT)
"Live" Stonehenge skyscape - actually a composited image, using a computer-generated night sky and a videoed daytime sky accurate to within 5 minutes (not actually a webcam as such; I think the video feed may be taken from somewhere nearby)
Virtual Grand Canyon star party, June 13-20, events every evening at 6 and 7 PM PDT. (Daylight time sic; I don't know why they chose to state the time in PDT instead of MST, since they're the same.) Various astronomy-related video presentations, not actual sky viewing (the sun is still up at those times, anyway!).

Oh APOD, how I've missed you! Who says NASA isn't an essential service? :P

Why are so many astronomy pictures so much prettier outside of the visible light spectrum? (this is false color for infrared)



(NB, this is a rhetorical question.)

Picture of the Sun during the July 11 eclipse: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100721.html

It's pretty and all but I'm amused by the language "The Crown of the Sun" (of course, the literal meaning of "corona") and by this: "features on the dim, near side of the New Moon can also be made out, illuminated by sunlight reflected from a Full Earth." I don't know how common it is to capture that in such a photograph, but it sort of compresses the Earth-Moon-Sun alignment required for a solar eclipse into a single symbolic image. The Sun containing the Moon and Earth, in other words, as in fact is the case (in an esoteric, Tree of Life sense, from the perspective of Earth). Just thought that was neat.

Nature's Winamp plug-in?

I have an iGoogle gadget that shows the current sky overhead. This is a few minutes ago. I just thought the neat little arc of Venus, the Sun, Mercury, Mars, and I guess Jupiter (the symbol is hard to see, but Saturn's been up at night lately, so process of elimination) all gathered together in Pisces, Aquarius, and Capricorn was kind of cool.

I have been looking at astrophotography for so long that I am pretty numb to a lot of it now. Yawn, another nebula. Yawn, another spiral galaxy. But now and then, APOD still manages to make me literally gasp.

*stare*

*cry*

Petalwing want go homeplace.