Ian Vince: "Modern highway building, and its representation on maps, has conspired to make us view landscapes as the interstitial blocks between roads, the white spaces in the road atlas. The dominant feature in the Stonehenge landscape, as revealed by a glance at any route map of the area, is that of a pennant pointing east formed by the A303 and two other major roads; it is only the neolithic and bronze age remains, spattered like grapeshot across the white spaces of an Ordnance Survey sheet, that break this uncompromising geometry."

"Astronomers, skeptics and fans of science are doing themselves a disservice by focusing on the wrong grounds for dismissing astrology."

BBC News Magazine on dark skies and stagazing tourism. "These sights will be explored in BBC Two's Stargazing Live this week, timed to coincide with the meteor shower and partial eclipse."

"Slooh will now provide data that will allow anyone using Google Sky to view a new map layer showing thousands of user-taken photographs of deep space, as well as to access imagery from observatories of eclipses and other significant celestial events."

"Restful Services for Satellites, Created at Science Hack Day 2010 in London"- saves installing my own C-wrapped Python or Ruby library (or the beast that is Perl's Astro::SpaceTrack) and instead letting someone else do the work. Which is nice.

"PyEphem provides scientific-grade astronomical computations for the Python programming language. Given a date and location on the Earth’s surface, it can compute the positions of the Sun and Moon, of the planets and their moons, and of any asteroids, comets, or earth satellites whose orbital elements the user can provide."

"First, we'd like to introduce Astronomer's Galleries: every month we've lined up a professional astronomer to curate a new astrophoto gallery." "Secondly, we'd like to invite you to make your own galleries from photos in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year group."

candace and I would repeatedly reload this in Iceland to figure out if it was worth going out to look at aurora. Very useful, even if it is basically just bumping along doing nothing for the moment.

Raw UK magnetic data, for use in predicting (and alerting for) auroras.

"Any kind of personality would be an improvement on @lowflyingrock’s robotic language" Maybe, maybe not. I went back to @abovelondon from @twisst because I got fed up with their self-promotion and backchat. @asteroidwatch also looks overly chatty. Me, I want my bots to be, well, robotic.

Someone has finally built abovelondon right; twisst sends personalised (based on location) ISS alerts via Twitter DM. It seems to be having teething troubles with API rate limiting, but it's nice to see someone implement this with optimum usefulness.

Like Where On Earth, but for space: put in an object and it'll return RA/dec (and a bunch of sources for images of that part of the sky).

Yay Foe! A short video on IO9 discussing the Astrometry bot and its use on Flickr and with the NMM's group there.

"Astrotags are a new way to label your photos of space – they describe what your photo is of, and where in space that is. With your help, we hope that astrotags will let us build a beautiful montage of your astronomy photos." Push a new one on the todo stack.

It's not as good as the New Yorker article on light pollution from a year or so ago, but it'll probably reach a wider audience, and that's a good thing. Nice photos too.

"Kevin Fetter, a veteran satellite observer in Brockville, Ontario, has spotted the lost tool bag using his backyard observatory and published a video of it online." "Fetter used a $900 Celestron Nexstar 102 SLT telescope fitted with a high-resolution camera, which was in turn connected via a networking cable to his computer."

"The NRAO Data Vault is a web-accessible collection of NRAO science data from the GBT, VLA and VLBA, which aims to provide convenient access to browse and download data products that have related keywords which match a free-text (Google-like) search query."

"If you submit your astronomy photo to the Astrometry group on Flickr, a tool of the same name will look at the image, tell you the location of the field of view, and label all of the celestial objects contained within it." "Your assignment: use the Astrometry and Exif data to stitch all these photos together into a huge Hockney-esque map of the sky."

Jonathan Glancey reviews the Kielder Observatory, which looks like it might be worth visiting if it were closer. Of course, if it was, then you'd never be able to see anything; pesky light pollution.

"Over the Air presentation by Tom Hume and Bryan Rieger of Future Platforms about the PrimeSky project they did for the Royal Observatory at Greewich" Looking forward to this launching.

"CORRECTION: The article originally said that there were nine planets in the solar system, which of course there aren't, following the demotion of Pluto" At least they acknowledged it...

Not a bad teaching tool, I suppose, but it's not unique (Google Sky) and the hyperbole is nauseating. A revolution on a par with Galileo? Please. The name's awful, too, candace points out: a telescope gives you new data, not just new combinations.

Subtitled "The war on light pollution", this is a glorious overview of the problems it causes and what we're all missing due to the human-generated glow in our skies. Well worth a read.

Observatories putting real-time data (updated every 15 minutes) into Google Sky.

"It doesn’t tell me what that current location is. It doesn’t tell me what time of day it’s using. It doesn’t move the sky in real time. It doesn’t tell me if the Sun is up or not. It doesn't tell me where the horizon is."

Here's the official Google Earth blog and the post describing the launch of what seems to be accurately, but longwindedly, called "Sky in Google Earth".

AboveLondon gets mentioned on Astronomy Blog, which is nice. Yes, it would be better if it was more personalised. Unfortunately that means messing with d messages or, worse, a real SMS gateway.

A useful alternative to abovelondon; it covers many more cities and gives you much more advance warning, but there's no indication of brightness.

Speculation by Travis Metcalfe from last December about using the Google Maps interface with NASA sky survey data. It'd be a bit odd (you're inside a sphere for the sky, rather than outside as with Earth) but it should work.

"The Magazine's search for Britain's greatest unsung landmark is over. The thousands of votes have been counted and Jodrell Bank in Cheshire is the winner."

US judge puts Weiku bugs before a few new telescopes at the top of Mauna Kea. Sigh.

Very pretty. Moon's back to being an evening object for the next two weeks. I suppose that means it's time to buy a tele-extender.

Shows moon/sun rise/set times for any date and location. Handy.

Handy Javascript widget for determining positions of, er, Jupiter's moons