Astronomers have found a diamond half the size of Jupiter. Like most planets outside our solar system, nobody’s seen it. In this case, the astronomers were looking at its parent star (a pulsar) and found that the star was being pulled slightly backwards and forwards by the mass of a planet, something as heavy as Jupiter and orbiting very close to the star indeed – just 600,000 kilometres, or 1.5…
On Sunday I had my first job with a bus full of people from a cruise ship. I was rather nervous: new company, new route, not as much time to read up as I’d have liked. But I reasoned that I’d picked up a lot of information in 20 years of living on the island and being interested in what was around me, and made sure I got to the…
The Escape Velocity Anthology got a great review on Amazon. And I particularly liked what she said about my story. “Scream Quietly” by Sheila Crosby was one of my favorite stories. Told by way of letters from the perspective of a young woman in 1849 England. This story depicts the intricacies of alien contact and space/ time travel. It’s a wonderfully heartwarming tale with a great twist at the end.
The William Herschel Telescope was for many years the biggest and best optical telescope in Europe (until GranTeCan opened in 2009). The main mirror is 4.2 m across (165″, or 13′ 9″) which astronomers call “a good light bucket”. It’s rather old as world-class telescopes go, since it opened in 1987, but it still produced excellent science. In fact data from the WHT has been used for about 1,500 scientific…
Teaser: “The Island” – La Palma Time Lapse Video from Christoph Malin on Vimeo. Enjoy Christoph Malin’s wonderful time-lapse video of La Palma. He very nearly does the place justice.
I went to someone’s leaving party on Saturday at a social club. It was nice to be invited, since my husband works with the host, not me. But the buffet was a problem. There were yummy looking croquets, which I couldn’t eat, since they were fried. Ditto the little tuna pastries. I couldn’t eat the cheese and anchovy sandwiches either. I made a beeline for the smoked salmon sandwiches –…