News Revisited

This comet was predicted to be magnitude 17 but is now clearly visible with the naked eye at about magnitude 3 from the Northern Hemisphere, reports A Quantum Diaries Survivor and a thread at www.irishastronomy.org.  It’s the extra star between Mirphak and Capella and looks similar to a globular cluster in a large telescope.

The GalaxyZoo project has announced its first preliminary results.  As I mentioned before the GalaxyZoo project asks the general public to classify images of galaxies.  The results they are announcing now is that galaxies tend to rotate counter-clockwise from our point of view.  If that were to hold true there would need to be a unknown force acting upon them or the universe would need to be lopsided in some way.  Naturally I have to wonder if there is a natural bias in the human eye/brain system that explains away this anomaly.  Of course, they have already considered this and are investigating it by adding a bunch of mirror images into the database to see how they are categorized.  This is quite an interesting project.

Another thing I find interesting is that when they compared their data to that of earlier work done professional astronomers they found that the self-selected general public is about as good at classifying galaxies.

Richard Garriott of Ultima fame will be the next space tourist if all goes well.  He’s currently slated for a visit to the International Space Station in October 2008. 

This one hits a little close to home for me.  Not long after the release of Ultima III Richard’s brother Robert invited me to tour their company, Origin Sys