Space

What do you do if you fail the eyesight test for the US Air Force, then fail the eyesight test for the US Navy? You go straight over their heads and join…

I was 13 years old in 1984, the Cold War was still years away from thawing, Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative had been announced the year before, and Space Shuttle Challenger is launched…

Jerry Bostick is a former NASA flight controller who worked in Mission Control during the golden age of spaceflight on Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab programmes, I’m meeting Jerry Bostick at the National…

In 1997 during a docking test with the use of an onboard remote control, an unmanned cargo vessel collided into the Russian Mir Space Station. The collision punctured part of the space…

The weather is scorching, the residual heat from a thousand local BBQs are not helping the situation and it feels like my sunglasses have melted on to my head. The sun in…

I remember the 80s…a time for heroes, high-five flyers and top gun shuttle pilots. Just as well then that today, thanks to the team at Space Lectures, I met Scott Altman, a…

Mark and Scott Kelly are the only siblings to have travelled in space with 4 spaceflights each and NASA’s only set of identical twin astronauts . Today, thanks to the great team…

My image of Messier 15 The Great Pegasus Cluster. In the constellation of Pegasus, easily found approx 4 degrees north west of the star Enif. Slightly smaller and fainter than the similar…

The Trifid Nebula, also known as Messier 20, is located over 5000 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius in a stellar nursery, a star forming region of the Scutum arm of…

That tiny round black dot is Mercury.  The 2016 Mercury transit of the Sun in a relatively rare astronomical event and visible in the UK for the entire time that Mercury’s silhouette…

A quick spot of solar astrophotography with ZWO ASI120MC camera on Sunspot AR2529 using Baader solar film white light filter. Nice to see sum detail coming through with a faster frame rate…

General Thomas P. Stafford is a veteran NASA astronaut who flew in space 4 times and in 4 different spacecraft, completing 6 rendezvous, orbited the moon and accumulated 507 hours in space.…

My image of the Leo Triplet was taken over several nights, stacking Luminance, Red, Green and Blue data together for this final image. The Leo triplet is a collection of galaxies  approximately…

Comet C/2013 X1 (PANSTARRS) currently in the constellation of Andromeda at a brightness of magnitude 9.2.  Comet C/2013 X1 is expected to get brighter with perihelion, its closest approach to the sun at a…

Tuesday November the 3rd sees us limping lamely along to the London Science Museum (£ Free), currently hosting the stunning Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age exhibition, a little steep at £14 each…

I am, by every definition, a nerd, a geek, a space nut, from astronomy and astrophotography to astronauts and Apollo from aged 4 to 44 (as I currently stand anyway).  Readers of…

Apollo 7 Astronaut Walt Cunningham was the lunar module pilot on Apollo 7, the first manned mission in the Apollo program after the fatal cabin fire of Apollo 1.  Today I’m meeting…

Sunspot 2396 has grown rapidly over the past few days and yesterday I had a chance to quickly capture between the clouds.  Sunspot 2396 stretches more than 150,000 km (93,000 miles) from…

Moving around the galactic circles that I do (even though I’m not  a heavenly body or will ever be accused of having a heavenly body), I’m up in Manchester meeting meeting Apollo, Skylab…

Hot on the heels of meeting high flyer Eileen Collins, today I’ve met Chuck Deiterich, NASA RETRO Flight Controller during the Apollo program, to attend his talk ‘A Tour of the U.S.…