"Let's start by first shrinking the Earth to the size of a Tennis Ball."

"That also lets me measure the number of spirals — roughly five — and calculate the size of this object: about a third of a light year across, or more than 3 trillion kilometers! Coooool."

"But there's another way. Gravitational waves should also stretch and squeeze pulsars as they pass by, subtly changing the radio pulses they produce. So by monitoring an array of pulsars throughout the galaxy, astronomers should be able to see the effects of nanohertz to microhertz gravitational waves passing by. The array of pulsars should effectively shimmer as the waves wash over it, like a grid of buoys bobbing on the ocean. ... These guys say the next generation of radio telescope arrays such as the Allen Telescope Array in California and the Square Kilometer Array in Australia or South Africa, should be capable of making the required measurements. And the scientific potential of the data is huge."

"We thought that this vertical structure was pretty neat when we first saw it in our simulations," said John Weiss, the paper's lead author at the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations in the U.S. city of Boulder, Colorado. "But it's a million times cooler to have your theory supported by such gorgeous images. It makes you suspect you might be doing something right."

"We decided to use the location features in the Android platform to implement search in an easy-to-use way. You enter the name of an object of interest, like Saturn, and the phone displays an arrow pointing to the object. As you get closer, the color of the arrow goes from blue to red and the app circles the object when you find it. Voila!"

> Who would remember if we all died?

The race of intelligent beings who, millions of years from now, finds a small black hole orbiting a star, with a flag on its moon. Honestly, if the human race has to end, that is exactly how I want us to go out.

"For ham radio operators who like to contact stations over greater distances than would ordinarily be possible on the VHF frequencies, radio aurora is great! Besides the thrill of making contacts that most poeple would consider impossible, the phenomenon itself is fascinating - and like its visual counterpart, very unpredictable. It's the thrill of the chase."

"careful studies of the distribution and motion of galaxies confirm that it is homogeneous on the largest scales we can see, with no sign of a special point to call the centre."

"At the center of spiral galaxy M81 is a supermassive black hole about 70 million times more massive than our sun."

"I'm not sure how it's useful to classify trans-Neptunian dwarf planets again just so they can exclude Ceres, but I'm sure there's a reason that's definitely not arbitrary!""

"This image of the Antennae galaxies is the sharpest yet of this merging pair of galaxies. During the course of the collision, billions of stars will be formed. The brightest and most compact of these star birth regions are called super star clusters."

Open source planetarium software. Killer app for that sort of thing.

Interesting timeline of future events for planet earth. Didn't know about the likelyhood of our galaxy colliding with another before the well known "sun expanding" event.

On October 24, 1946, not long after the end of World War II and years before the Sputnik satellite opened the space age, a group of soldiers and scientists in the New Mexico desert saw something new and wonderful—the first pictures of Earth as seen from

A video demonstrating the scale of size difference between various planets and types of star.