Sun 10 Jun 2007
There is a great collection of links about the current shuttle mission on ResourceShelf. I had intended to post this on Friday, before the launch, but better late than never.
FYI, spotting the shuttle in orbit is a neat experience (I saw it for the first time last July 4th), and the SkyWatch site does a nice job at letting you know when good opportunities exist for your location. I definitely recommend it!
Sat 19 May 2007
It’s WikiSky!
Ideal for answering the question “was that object in the western sky a star or planet?”, as well as many other star / constellation type questions. It also includes photographs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which means that you can view photographs of that same area of sky.
Mon 19 Mar 2007
It’s not at the “web-based, jump in - the water’s fine” stage (though they indicate that they are working towards this), but the United States Geologic Service (USGS) has developed a National Land Cover Database from 2001 LandSat imagery.
This information provides very detailed (98ft square) information on every piece of land in the lower 48 states. If you have an interest in this, and don’t mind working with database information, check out their web site!
from ResourceShelf
Tue 30 Jan 2007
Google’s Moon Shot is the title of an article in the current New Yorker magazine. The title refers to a quote that likens the Google Book Project to Nasa’s Project Apollo.
Quite a bit of interest in this article, including the estimated number of books in WorldCat: 32,000,000 (note that the WorldCat site indicates “over 1 billion items”.
posted on Web4Lib
Mon 2 Oct 2006
When I listen to the audio of Neil Armstrong’s words during the first moon landing, I have heard the “a” ever since I found out that it was what he meant to say. Whether that was wishful thinking, or if I was hearing what the software detected recently (follow the links if you don’t know what I am referring to).
Print version of the news story
NPR’s All Things Considered audio version (includes several playings of the recording).
One additional note: I think that every newspaper that ran the original quote back in 1969 ought to run a correction tomorrow, just for kicks. 
Sun 1 Oct 2006
NASA recently made 1100 Apollo-era documents, including Mission Reports (I have read several, and they are truly fascinating to those interested in manned spaceflight), Evaluation Reports, Scientific Studies, and Interviews, available on a DVD-ROM, calling it the Lunar e-Library. Fantastic! All are government documents, and putting them all together like this is a boon for researchers, enthusiasts, historians, librarians, and such.
However, they contracted for software that limits distribution of the software itself to employees of NASA. That’s it. Game over. Nobody else can use this wonderful DVD. There are several good options in the open source software world for this project, and the only restriction would be that the software license would need to remain open. No big deal.
Why keep all this wonderful information closed off? This would have been one of the great DVD-ROM offerings, except it cannot be offered to the public because of a restrictive software license, and for no good reason. Arrrghh!
from Catalogablog
Sun 27 Aug 2006
…it didn’t, and won’t, appear so from the Earth (unless something goes very, very wrong)!
Nasa ; UniverseToday ; Bad Astronomy
Tue 25 Jul 2006
Planet Quest is a 3-Dimensional interactive viewer for the Milky Way galaxy. It works on any modern browser without downloading additional software, a definite plus!
from SpaceRef
