Meteorite found due to skycam
Out in Western Australia, in the Nullabor desert, there is an array of sky cameras designed to observe meteors as they flame their way through our atmosphere. It’s been observing the sky since 2006, and it paid off handsomely: a bright meteor observed by the skycam has led to the resulting meteorite being found. Cooool. By triangulating the meteor, astronomers were able to track the rock all the way to the ground, where the meteorite was found only 100 meters from the predicted location. Not only that, the track of the meteor on the

Carl Sagan Day live stream!
My friend, the magician Andrew Mayne, is here at Carl Sagan Day, and told me that he will be live streaming the entire event on UStream! I’ve embedded the video viewer below (hopefully it won’t start playing automatically). If you go to the UStream page Andrew set up there’s a chat room where you can talk to fellow astronomy and space enthusiasts too. Online video chat by Ustream Th

Reminder: Carl Sagan Day
A quick reminder: the Carl Sagan Day celebration will be at Broward College in southern Florida on Saturday! Speakers include James Randi, Jeffrey Bennett, David Morrison, and me. There will be lots of stuff for kids and astronomy enthusiasts of all ages. Check my blog post from Monday for more info. Also, there will be a reception that night at 8:00 p.m. as well. Requested donation is $10. I hope to see some BABloggees there!

Pray this doesn’t get passed
I was going to write about how Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and John Kerry (D-MA) were trying to somewhat slimily slip a provision into the health care bill about paying for prayer-based health services, but then wouldn’tyouknowit, Steve Novella (who apparently does not need to sleep or eat or breathe) beat me to it. Besides his take-down of the odd and wholly unrealistic beliefs of Christian Scientists, I’ll note that is has been pretty definitively proven that

Careidolia
OK, I know that some people see the face of their religious icons in random things. I’ve written about this a zillion times. And I know that sometimes it’s just pareidolia, our tendency to see faces in random objects. And I know that people will think it’s a miracle, when really it’s the end-product of thousands of generations of the evolution of our pattern-seeking abilities.