In this very special Astroengine.com (and long overdue) post, I had the great fortune to catch up with singer/song writer CraftLass who wrote a very cool song about science, ignorance and the general state of society. I am particularly honored as CraftLass was inspired by my blog (amongst others) when...

Solar Dynamics Observatory view of the solar disk shortly after eruption (NASA). This morning, at 08:55 UT, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) detected a C3-class flare erupt inside a sunspot cluster. 100,000 kilometers away, deep within the solar atmosphere (the corona), an extended magnetic...

The Aram Chaos region of Mars, as seen by the HiRISE camera on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (NASA) There’s a military operation on Mars! How do we know this? Psychics — or “military grade remote viewers” as they like to be called — “saw” it, and...

A bolt of lightning strikes over Strasbourg, France (Ian O'Neill) As you may have noticed, things have been rather quiet on Astroengine of late. This is partly due to my pan-European trek and my work on Discovery News, but mainly due to my horrid affliction of procrastination. Hence why I’m late...

There’s not a lot to add to this video, it’s too awesome. It was captured by NASA’s converted DC-8 jet that was flying over Australia when the Japanese Hayabusa spacecraft broke up during re-entry. I’ll let the video do the rest of the talking: Oh yes, and that little dot ahead...

The Moon, Space Shuttle Atlantis, an aurora plus Kibo, all in one breathtaking scene (Soichi Noguchi) The instant I saw this photograph I realized I was seeing something so beautiful, I’d have a hard job writing something to accompany it. Coming straight from the Twitter feed of Soichi Noguchi,...

My impression as to how a black hole 'aurora' might look like near an event horizon (Ian O'Neill/Discovery News) Usually, aurorae happen when the solar wind blasts the Earth’s atmosphere. However, black holes may also have a shot at producing their very own northern lights. What’s more, we...

The Voyager 2 spacecraft has been speeding through the Solar System since 1977 and it’s seen a lot. Besides scooting past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, the probe is now passing through the very limit of the heliosphere (called the heliopause) where it has begun to detect a magnetic field...

Astroengine.com is now being syndicated by The Christian Science Monitor! The CSM has been around for ever (well, since 1908) and it’s a publication that’s won seven Pulitzer Prizes. That’s all kinds of awesome. Personally, I’ve been following CSMonitor.com for some time and their...

That's no space rock: The Israeli 'meteorite' that never was (Ilan Lilush, Tel Aviv Police). UPDATE (April 25): The unidentified combustible object has been identified as being “man made” rather than anything cosmic in origin. “It is definitely not a meteor and not a different natural...