NASA’s last flight of Discovery – If you have always wanted to watch a launch of the Shuttle that lofted Hubble into orbit, then you get one final chance: the last scheduled flight of Discovery is now set for November 1. -Phil Plait / Bad Astronomy

Pluto and Charon opposition surges, Nix and Hydra masses, Pluto and Eris compositions – An awful lot of the talks in the Pluto session on Tuesday morning, October 5, at the Division of Planetary Sciences meeting spent more time focusing on how bad weather conditions were during the astronomers’ attempts to view Pluto as it occulted background stars than they did on any measurements or science that came out from the data. – Emily Lakdawalla / The Planetary Society

Five Things About NASA’s EPOXI Mission – Here are five quick facts about the EPOXI mission, scheduled to fly by comet Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, 2010. -NASA/JPL

Another X-ray Nova Detected by ISS, Swift – A new X-ray emitting object in the Milky Way has been recently announced by the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) team and the Swift satellite astronomers. MAXI, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency supported instrument, monitors the entire sky in the X-ray portion of the spectrum from its perch on the International Space Station module “Kibo”. On October 12th, MAXI noticed nothing out of the ordinary in a portion of the sky in the constellation Centaurus. -Nicholos Wethington / Universe Today

[more stories]

Videos

Photos

The Moon a few nights ago

Sunrise

Sunspot

Richat structure in Mauritania

Gallery Pick of the Day

Milky Way all around the horizon line and Gegenschein from Atacama desert in Chile - Credit: Stéphane Guisard

The photo above is “Pick of the Day” from one of the three galleries: Astronomy Gallery, Space Shuttle Gallery and Space Station Gallery. More information as well as different views are available at Stéphane’s page.

Flying to the Moon – From the Space Station? - Last month the International Space Station partner agencies met to discuss the continuation of space station operations into the next decade and its use as a research laboratory. They also did a little forward thinking, and talked about some unique possibilities for the station’s future, including the potential for using the space station as a launching point to fly a manned mission around the Moon. -Nancy Atkinson – Universe Today

NASA Administrator Thanks President Obama and Congress for Agency’s New Direction Support – The following is a statement from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in support of President Obama’s signing of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2010 on Monday, Oct. 11, 2010 … -NASA

Solar storms coming our way this week? – The Sun is getting back into the swing of things: a big active region on its limb erupted yesterday (October 10), sending out a small storm of subatomic particles into space. We weren’t in the line of fire, but over the next few days the rotation of the Sun will bring Active Region 11112 closer to the center of the Sun’s disk, and if that region erupts it may send a storm our way. -Phil Plait / Bad Astronomy

[more stories]

Videos

Photos

Active Region 11112

Milky Way, Jupiter and Scorpio

Sunrise

Obama Signs NASA Authorization Act

Gallery Pick of the Day

Latest image of aurora borealis above Yellowknife, taken at 03h10 MDT October 10, 2010.

The photo above is “Pick of the Day” from one of the three galleries: Astronomy Gallery, Space Shuttle Gallery and Space Station Gallery.