Psychogeeks

IC2948 is the less-than-spectacular catalogue number for a nebula in the constellation Centaurus. The more popular name is the Running Chicken Nebula. Steve Crouch, an avid astro-photographer in the Canberra Astronomical Society, took the image below and asks, “Can everyone see the running chicken?”. Well, can you?

[Read more →]

A short while ago I posted images taken of the Tvashtar volcano on Io. The images were snapped by the New Horizons mission to the dwarf planet Pluto. Some months have passed since those images were taken, and the mission’s imaging team has had time to assemble some of the 700 observations the [...]

[Read more →]

Swinburne University, my alma mater, has recently started publishing podcasts covering research programs at the university. It is often very difficult to keep abreast of research goings-on without keeping a constant reading program of appropriate journals. Even a lot of the journal articles I do read are too terse for an outsider [...]

[Read more →]

The image to the left was taken by the adaptive optics team at the Keck Observatory during 2005. It shows a distant Kuiper Belt object known at that time as 2003 UB313, and a small companion object. Despite poetic naming not being an astronomy strong point the discoverers of 2003 UB313 [1] had unofficially nicknamed [...]

[Read more →]

I’ve recently been wanting to run a few simulations of solar system dynamics to generate data for animations of various phenomena. One of the most used tools for this in astronomy circles has been the SWIFT package by Hal Levison and Martin Duncan. I used a web-hosted version of SWIFT during my studies [...]

[Read more →]