I woke up early on Wednesday morning, half feeling like a kid on Christmas morning, half feeling like I’d rather just stay in bed. While most people in the UK were sound asleep, amateur and professional astronomers alike got up before dawn to witness an astronomical spectacle that won’t happen again until the year 2117: [...]

Galaxies do not usually exist alone. They tend to bunch together in small groups, like the Local Group of galaxies in which the Milky Way sits, or larger groups called clusters. This is useful for cosmologists, as it gives them a chance to study one of the most elusive substances in the universe: dark matter. [...]

Being a student of Imperial College has a few perks. Our campus is on the same road as three of the biggest museums in London: the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert, and the Science Museum. Not that you get much time to visit them when you have days full of lectures, seminars, tutorials [...]

When a mystery object smacked into Jupiter without warning in July 2009, an event whose aftermath was first spotted by an amateur astronomer in Australia, observers across the globe scrambled to get a look at the planet to figure out just what had happened. Astronomers working on other campaigns at world-class observatories, including one of [...]

Back in May 2009, the Hubble Space Telescope got its final tune-up. The seven astronauts of the STS-125 mission flew to Hubble on space shuttle Atlantis, grabbed the observatory with a robotic arm and pulled Hubble into the shuttle’s open payload bay for repair. They then commenced an intensive servicing itinerary that spanned five spacewalks. [...]

Where are all the space-art bloggers?  When Symbiartic was in the planning stages, this was a post I knew I had to write. There are so few I found it at first surprising.  Do the images from the Hubble trump inspiration in painters?  Is interest in space waning compared to say, paleontology? Science inspired art [...]

By far the most common question I get when I tell people that I am a scientific illustrator is one variation (some more tactful than others) of, “They still use illustrators? Why don’t they just photograph everything?” In fact, it’s a great question. Although photography is fantastically impressive and can offer glimpses into worlds both [...]