Happy Birthday, Hubble!
- By Maggie Masetti
- May 19, 2015
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After all our satellite birthday celebrations, we’d be remiss if we didn’t wish the Hubble Space Telescope a happy 25th! We’re a little belated, but that’s ok – it just means that our birthday wish won’t be lost amongst the millions of others on Hubble’s metaphorical Facebook wall! And of … Continue Reading →
Fermi Inspires
- By Maggie Masetti
- May 14, 2015
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We blogged last year about students at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) collaborating with Fermi scientists to create short films illustrating or inspired by results from the Fermi Gamma-Ray Observatory. Just recently, a new group of students presented their own Fermi videos, and we thought we would share … Continue Reading →
More “Voorwerps”?
- By Maggie Masetti
- April 16, 2015
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Back in 2010, Koji wrote a guest blog for us on Hanny’s Voorwerp. What is this? Back in 2007, a Dutch woman named Hanny van Arkel discovered an odd and until then unclassified ghostly gaseous structure near the galaxy IC 2497 while using the citizen science site, Galaxy Zoo. The … Continue Reading →
JWST’s Pathfinder On the Move
- By Maggie Masetti
- April 6, 2015
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2014 held a lot of excitement for NASA Goddard’s cleanroom. We had a huge piece of James Webb Space Telescope hardware there – which made giving talks and tours about the telescope really fun. Especially since it was really impressive looking! This piece of hardware I’m talking about is the … Continue Reading →
Eating Eta Car
- By Maggie Masetti
- March 12, 2015
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We recently posted about the gamma-ray novae cake made for a Science as Food competition at a Poster Party here at Goddard. Dr. Barb Mattson also participated in this contest and we caught up with her to find out more about her Eta Carina cake. NASA Blueshift: Can you introduce … Continue Reading →
No Mardi Gras under a Full Moon
- By Koji Mukai
- February 12, 2015
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Here is a fun factoid: Mardi Gras is never celebrated under a Full Moon. If you have come across any books, movies, songs or whatever that describes Mardi Gras under a Full Moon, you know it’s a work of fiction. Calendar and astronomy are intimately linked. The civil calendar used … Continue Reading →
Science as Food
- By Maggie Masetti
- February 9, 2015
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We’ve got a little running theme here of space cakes here at Blueshift. And we’ve got another one for you – this time it’s a gamma-ray Novae cake. And we also have an interview with the cake-makers, who we have actually featured before (links to their other cakes at at … Continue Reading →
Weather or not…
- By Maggie Masetti
- January 29, 2015
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Recently I got a question about the James Webb Space Telescope and weather on exoplanets and how we know what type of weather is occurring. Essentially, do we take pictures of these planets and then interpret the weather from them? The answer is – not exactly. Aside from the fact … Continue Reading →
Rossi X-ray Timing (and cake) Explorer
- By Maggie Masetti
- January 26, 2015
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We just passed the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer’s 20th birthday last month – a little tricky since the satellite is no longer in service. But why not take a quick look back and its awesome history, which we did in this blog on its 15th anniversary. In the grand (and … Continue Reading →
Space Cakes – James Webb Space Telescope edition…
- By Maggie Masetti
- December 19, 2014
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We’ve somehow managed to post about a variety of astronomical and satellite-oriented cakes on this blog. There was Swift’s 10th birthday, and Fermi’s 5th birthday – and then I stumbled across these photos from 2012 of a James Webb Space Telescope cake and had to share. This cake was made … Continue Reading →
