Starlight: a meditation.

Sometimes it's fun to think about things that no one has thought about before.

Virtual Visit of the Canadian Space Agency [Macromedia Flash Player]

Imagine if you will, taking a tour of the Canadian Space Agency’s
headquarters in Longueuil, Quebec. After that thought passes, then imagine
being led through some of the fascinating areas of these same headquarters
that are normally off-limits to the public, guided by a narrator whose voice
closely resembles the authoritative tone reserved for movie trailers. This
is exactly what you, gentle reader, will find upon arriving on the homepage
of this site. The site opens up with a series of screens that zoom the
viewer onto the Agency’s visually stunning complex, then proceeds to visit
some of the interesting areas within that same edifice. Along the way,
visitors will find their way to the optics laboratory, the Mars greenhouse,
and the mission control centre, along with another dozen or so locations.
During this visit, visitors can read a brief description of each locale and
follow along with the aforementioned knowing voice of the previously
mentioned narrator.

Three cosmic enigmas, one audacious answer

For a star as big as our universe the calculated vacuum energy inside its shell matches the value of dark energy seen in the universe today. "It's like we are living inside a giant dark energy star" say two physicists and their collegues. Dark energy stars may do away with the concept of black holes.

The world's largest scientific instrument is under construction beneath the polar ice

Encompassing a square kilometer of the Antarctic icecap, the IceCube array of photodetectors is designed to spot neutrinos, those most elusive of particles. You can see pictures of IceCube being built at the South Pole, or a video (quicktime) of what the detector network looks like. Other massive neutrino detectors are also photogenic, like the Super Kamiokande (other pictures), located in a mine a kilometer underground, or BooNe at Fermilab, filled with 800 tons of mineral oil.

Ancient observatories from space

Satellite images of Angkor Wat, Chichen Itza, Chaco Canyon, Stonehenge, Teotihuacan, and others. The observers, observed. High res images available.