Tuesday's solar eclipse was a "ring of fire" annular eclipse, but only for an uninhabited area of Antarctica. But for observers in Australia, the moon appeared to cover about 65% of the sun, resulting in a striking partial solar eclipse at sunset.

"I felt lucky to view and capture the eclipse this afternoon due to continuous partial cloud cover," photographer CJ Armitage says  after snapping a spectacular view of the eclipsed setting sun.

"Time seemed to stand still during the brief moments of visibility while I wanted in awe of this natural phenomenon.
Tuesday's eclipse of the sun was the first of two solar eclipses of 2014, with the second event occurring on Oct. 23. The October event will be visible primarily from Canada and the United States. The next moon eclipse will be a total lunar eclipse on Oct. 8th!

"First Solar Eclipse of 2014 Thrills Skywatchers in Australia (Photos)."
     Space.com. N.p., 28 Apr. 2014. Web. 29 Apr. 2014. S

This will  only be visible to those in Antarctica and Australia, if you are not in either of those places, have no fear!

The whole event will be streamed real time  here: http://bit.ly/1fiRmYD

Don't miss it!

On Thusday April 17th 2014,  NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope viewed “the Tadpole,” (Image on the right), a clump of gas and dust making its way through Cygnus OB2 association, a loose cluster of stars some 4,700 ligh-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

This clump of gas and dust has given birth to protostars, which represent the earliest steps in building a star. The glowing yellow light in the “head” is the most luminous and massive star. Nearby stars firing ultraviolet radiation at IRAS 20324+4057 creates the intense blue glow, which also sculpts its "tail" into a long, wiggly shape. This clump stretches roughly a light-year from head to tail-tip, and contains gas weighing almost four times the mass of the sun.

"Tadpole (Not in a Jar)." Space.com. N.p., 17 Apr. 2014. Web. 27 Apr. 2014.
 Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) and IPHAS

The US company has confirmed that the first-stage of the vehicle launched from Cape Canaveral a week ago used its engines to slow its fall, deployed a set of legs and made a "soft landing"The stage was vertical and had zero velocity on contact.

Extremely rough seas meant that a boat could not get to the scene for two days to try to salvage the stage before it sank.

Potentially, the experiment has enormous significance for the space industry.

As a vehicle makes an ascent, it dumps propellant stages, which then fall to destruction, torn apart as they tumble end over end.

SpaceX believes if it can recover those stages and fly them again and again, the cost of access to space could be dramatically reduced.

"No-one has ever soft-landed a liquid-rocket boost-stage before," said SpaceX chief designer Elon Musk. "I think this bodes well for achieving reusability.

"What SpaceX has done thus far is evolutionary, not revolutionary. [But] if we can recover the stage intact and re-launch it, the potential is there for a truly revolutionary impact in space transport costs."

Amos, Jonathan, ed. "SpaceX rocket stage in 'soft landing.'" BBC News. British
     Broadcasting Corporation, 25 Apr. 2014. Web. 26 Apr. 2014.

Dont you just love the moon? It is something we see almost everyday, and every night. But how much do we actually know about the moon? Here are some quick facts.


"The moon is friend for the lonesome to talk to.”
― Carl Sandburg


During the 1950’s the USA considered detonating a nuclear bomb on the Moon:
The secret project was during the height cold war was known as “A Study of Lunar Research Flights” or “Project A119″ and meant as a show of strength at a time they were lagging behind in the space race.

The dark side of the moon is a myth:
In reality both sides of the Moon see the same amount of Sun however only one side of the Moon is ever seen from Earth this is because the Moon rotates around on its own axis in exactly the same time it takes to orbit the Earth, meaning the same side is always facing the Earth. The side we see is lit by reflected sunlight, while the side facing away from Earth lies in darkness and has only been seen by the human eye from a spacecraft.

The rise and fall of the tides on Earth is caused by the Moon:
There are two bulges in the Earth due to the gravitational pull that the Moon exerts; one on the side facing the Moon, and the other on the opposite side that faces away from the Moon, The bulges move around the oceans as the Earth rotates, causing high and low tides around the globe.

The Moon is drifting away from the Earth:
The Moon is moving approximately 3.8 cm away from our planet every year. It is estimated that it will continue to do so for around 50 billion years. By the time that happens, the Moon will be taking around 47 days to orbit the Earth instead of the current 27.3 days.


The Moon has only been walked on by 12 people;
The first man to set foot on the Moon in 1969 was Neil Armstrong on the Apollo 11 mission, while the last man to walk on the Moon in 1972 was Gene Cernan on the Apollo 17 mission. Since then the Moon has only be visited by unmanned vehicles.


The Moon has quakes:
These are caused by the gravitational pull of the Earth. Lunar astronauts used seismographs on their visits to the Moon, and found that small moonquakes occurred several kilometres beneath the surface, causing ruptures and cracks. Scientists think the Moon has a molten core, just like Earth.

"Moon Facts." Space-Facts. N.p., 2014. Web. 25 Apr. 2014.

"The South Pole is the closest you can get to space and still be on the ground," says John Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, leader of the BICEP2 collaboration. "It's one of the driest and clearest locations on Earth, perfect for observing the faint microwaves from the Big Bang."

Almost 14 billion years ago, the universe we inhabit burst into existence in an extraordinary event that initiated the Big Bang. In the first fleeting fraction of a second, the universe expanded exponentially, stretching far beyond the view of our best telescopes. All this, of course, was just theory. Until last month when researchers from the BICEP2 collaboration announced the first direct evidence for this cosmic inflation. Their data also represent the first images of gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time. These waves have been described as the "first tremors of the Big Bang." Finally, the data confirm a deep connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity. "Detecting this signal is one of the most important goals in cosmology today. A lot of work by a lot of people has led up to this point," said Kovac.

According to the theory of Inflation, the Universe underwent a violent and rapid expansion at only 10^-35 seconds after the Big Bang, making the horizon size much larger, and allowing the space to become flat. Confirmation of Inflation would be an amazing feat in observational Cosmology. Inflation during the first moments of time produced a Cosmic Gravitational-Wave Background (CGB), which in turn imprinted a faint but unique signature in the polarization of the CMB. Since gravitational waves are by nature tensor fluctuations, the polarization signature that the CGB stamps onto the CMB has a curl component (called "B-mode" polarization). In contrast, scalar density fluctuations at the surface of last scattering only contribute a curl-free (or "E-mode") polarization component to the CMB which was first detected by the DASI experiment at the South Pole.

Observing from the South Pole, this series of experiments aims to discover signatures of Inflation by actually detecting the CGB via its weak imprint as the unique B-mode polarization signature of the CMB, directly probing the Universe at an earlier time than ever before.

Last month, scientists announced the first hard evidence for cosmic inflation, the process by which the infant universe swelled from microscopic to cosmic size in an instant. This almost unimaginably fast expansion was first theorized more than three decades ago, yet only now has "smoking gun" proof emerged when the world was stunned by announcement in March that a telescope at the South Pole (image above) had detected a cosmic fossil from the earliest moments of creation.

These groundbreaking results came from observations by the BICEP2 telescope of the cosmic microwave background -- a faint glow left over from the Big Bang. Tiny fluctuations in this afterglow provide clues to conditions in the early universe. For example, small differences in temperature across the sky show where parts of the universe were denser, eventually condensing into galaxies and galactic clusters.

"'Farside of the World' --South Pole's Role in the Epic Discovery of
     Gravitational Waves." The Daily Galaxy. N.p., 24 Apr. 2014. Web. 25 Apr.
     2014.

The chance of a city-killing asteroid striking Earth is higher than scientists believed, a non-profit group building an asteroid-hunting telescope said on Tuesday.

A global network that detects  nuclear weapons detonations, discovered 26 asteroids that exploded in Earth's atmosphere from 2000 to 2013 (data collected by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization shows.)

    Former astronaut Ed Lu says "There is a popular misconception that asteroid impacts are extraordinarily rare ... that's incorrect

Asteroids as small as about 131 feet - less than half the size of a football field - have the potential to destroy a city, Lu told reporters on a conference call

    "Picture a large apartment building - moving at Mach 50," (50 times the speed of sound) Lu said.

NASA already has a program in place that tracks asteroids larger than 0.65 mile. An object of this size, roughly equivalent to a small mountain, would have global consequences if it struck Earth.

"For now all we have to do is wait"

Koltz, Irene. "Risk of asteroid hitting Earth higher than thought, study shows."
     Reuters. N.p., 24 Apr. 2014. Web. 24 Apr. 2014.