From Spaceweather.com:Mike Tyrrell photographed the expanding spaceship through his 10-inch Meade LX-200. The new panels are indicated by the arrow: Meanwhile in the Czech Republic, Martin Popek photographed an "ISS flare" from his hometown of Nýdek:

From the European Space Agency web site comes a nice Google Gadget mashup that shows the ground track of several noteworthy satellites including the Hubble Space Telescope [HST], and the International Space Station [ISS]. Just click on the links in the table below to see exactly where overhead any one of these satellites fly displayed on Google Maps.

Most of us probably think of the Moon as our constant and reliable companion, always showing a familiar face. Popular lore has us always seeing the same face of the moon, the "bright side," with the dark side forever hidden from earthbound viewers as the moon orbits in lock-step with the Earth's rotation.But as with much of science, the tricky little details reveal a more interesting picture. Here is a short animation sequence taken by Laurent Laveder in France that is comprised of full moon images captured every (lunar) month for two years, all compressed into 2 seconds of video.This video is a fantastic articulation of the fact that the Moon's orbit around Earth is not, in fact, a perfect circle, but rather an ellipse (with about 5% eccentricity) which travels closer and then farther away in turn and changing apparent size in the process. The orbit is tilted slightly with respect to Earth's daily planetary rotation, presenting slightly varying angles, and there is obviously some wobble in the orbital path, which astronomers call libration. In total, we actually see somewhere closer to 59% of the Moon over time rather than what the pedestrian 50% bright-side model ...

While I may have posted not too long ago about the inevitable obsolescence of the Hubble Space Telescope, the old girl still impresses. NASA recently released the largest-ever visible image panorama on the 17th anniversary of the telescope.The incredible detail is simply stunning, and exposes the process of stellar evolution as never before seen. Here are a few of the images, but do be sure to click through to the NASA site in order to see them in all their massive native-resolution glory.Hubble's view of the Carina Nebula shows star birth in a new level of detail. The fantasy-like landscape of the nebula is sculpted by the action of outflowing winds and scorching ultraviolet radiation from the monster stars that inhabit this inferno. In the process, these stars are shredding the surrounding material that is the last vestige of the giant cloud from which the stars were born.The immense nebula is an estimated 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina the Keel (of the old southern constellation Argo Navis, the ship of Jason and the Argonauts, from Greek mythology). This image is a mosaic of the Carina Nebula assembled from 48 frames taken with ...

Cassini just keeps on chugging. From the NASA site: Such a view is only possible from the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft. This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 33 degrees above the ringplane. Shadows of the innermost rings are cast upon the planet at upper left. The edge of Saturn's shadow cuts a straight line across the rings near upper right. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on March 30, 2007 at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 117 kilometers (73 miles) per pixel. For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org . Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Several friends have asked me recently what I thought of the eventual, and possibly imminent, decommissioning of the Hubble Space telescope, arguably one of the preeminent scientific instruments of the last century. My reply describing wondrous past utility now becoming obsolete was almost always met with stark surprise. Wasn't Phillip supposed to be the champion of all things space and astronautics?Well, for all you space telescope traditionalists, witness the future today. Last week, there was a release from the Gemini Observatory in Hilo, HI that included images even the Hubble telescope couldn't have taken, and they were taken from the ground, through the earth's atmosphere.The Gemini observatory images combined optical and infrared wavelength images of the Pillars of Creation area of the Orion nebula. The really interesting new data refutes one of the earlier theories that hot energetic starts were blowing dust and matter off of several proto-stellar objects to form the dusty pillars. Gemini's latest data shows that there was a violent explosion from below the lower left corner of the image that ejected several large objects (shown in blue from the hot and energetic iron gas emissions) that are leaving wakes of energized ...

NASA's Chandra X-Ray observatory in orbit is racking up quite a record of groundbreaking discoveries this year. After enabling the verification of Dark Matter earlier this year, Chandra's latest mission peered through interstellar dust and obscuration that have historically plagued visible light instruments to discover over 1000 Black Holes in a patch of the sky about the size of a paperback book held at arm's length.Each of the colored dots in the field below (taken in the constellation Bootes) is a direct image of a black hole that lies at the center of a remote galaxy (hence the name "Active Galactic Nuclei" [AGN]).X-Ray astronomers are already all stirred up about the fact that the prevailing theories on Black Hole formation and light emission are now being called into question by this new data. In our latest theories, matter falling into Black Holes would emit light as it sheds angular momentum while falling into the hole, to result in a bright torus (donut) of orbiting matter. Animation Published by: Goddard Space Flight Center Date Published: April 30, 2001Official ID:blackholebinary1Animation from Harvard's Chandra center.But Chandra's latest survey doesn't show the distribution of brightness we would expect from ...

If these first test shots from NASA's Stereo-B satellite are any indication of what more is to come, the future is bright indeed. NASA's Stereo Satellite pair is now in orbit around the sun, both leading and lagging the earth in order to capture stereo views of solar activity.The first official images are expected in April, but on the warm-up run, Stereo-B captured an amazing series of images of a lunar transit across the face of the sun. (Note that the moon looks smaller than a typical solar eclipse because Stereo-B is much farther from the moon than the earth, while at a similar distance from the sun.)See the movie: small, medium or large.All images courtesy of NASA. Click here for all the details.

Here are a couple nice shots of last weekend's lunar eclipse, courtesy SpaceWeather.com