Fans of the old show will love the opening two scenes of this week's Castle.

I was looking around for some Dark Skies in my neighborhood and surrounding states. I came across The Cherry Springs Star Party in Northern PA, and it sounds pretty spectacular. Their next party is June 10-13. I was curious what the moon phase would be at the time, and found this moon phase calculator. Of course, those clever astronomers used something similar to pick their date...new moon on the 10th.

The report is out, the readers and other readers are discussing it, the Congress is preparing to fight it, but in the end, what will happen? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a speech will happen. That's all I'll stand by for now.

Two events happened twenty years ago. The Loma Prieta Earthquake (on Oct 17th) and the launch of the Galileo Probe to Jupiter (on Oct 18th). Why are these items related? Because the Galileo probe was pushed out of Earth orbit using an Inertial Upper Stage, and that stage was controlled from Sunnyvale, CA near the epicenter of the quake. The people who were to control the IUS evacuated the facility during the quake, then returned the next morning, held their breath, and turned the computers back on. All was OK, so the launch was a go.

An image was captured of a meteor's streak through the sky. There should be many more cameras like this throughout North America.

...is that they don't always go the way you want. The live feed from the LCROSS Impact was a bit underwhelming, but the visual image frame rate was only 10 frames/sec. I don't know how long a visual flash would last, but apparently it was less than 1/10th of a second. Most likely, the less visual data will provide a better show without the instant gratification.

Update: Paul Spudis is more programmatically disappointed.

Ice found on an Asteroid using spectroscopy from Earth.