The night sky has always fascinated me. It's incredibly beautiful, and peaceful.
The idea of other planets, other landscapes is fascinating.
Reality is cool.
All of these things have helped maintain my interest in astronomy. When I was young, I remeber watching every episode of Cosmos by Carl Sagan. All of the pictures from telescopes and space probes were (and are) beautiful. Some of the more bizarre and interesting scientific ideas have strong ties to astronomy. Relativity is usually easiest to think about with references to interstellar travel. Why should black holes exist? Where did the universe come from? What is the ultimate fate of the universe? Why is the universe the way it is? These are all questions for astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology. They're the kinds of things I'll write about on this page.

For now, all of this stuff will be together on one page. If it becomes too unwieldy, I'll split it up.

First up, some comments about the sources of many of the most beautiful astronomical pictures out there: the Hubble Space Telescope and the Voyager space probes.

From the very beginning, I thought that the press did a rather bad job in presenting the story of the Hubble. Even in the state it was in when first launched, it was still the finest tool for observing the stars and planets that had ever existed. Its problem (and it was a big problem) was that its mirror was ground to the wrong shape. It was not ground poorly or deformed; in fact, it was an almost perfect shape. The problem was that it was the wrong shape. At some point during the testing, a lens in the testing apparatus was inserted incorrectly, which then made the grinding/polishing setup take it to a near-perfect but improper shape. That's why the repair mission was able to correct almost everything: they just inserted a correcting lens, essentially. It's also why even before then, computers could do a great deal to reconstruct what the image should look like: the shape was wrong, but known perfectly.
The Hubble has provided images of the strongest evidence yet for black holes, has helped inspire more public interest in astronomy, and helped in a huge number of research projects, among other things. Using it, we can see surface details on Jupiter's moons all the way from Earth orbit. Many of its pictures are available to the public on the web and FTP sites. The site where I got my favorite pictures (including the one of Eta Carinae) is here, at http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.html.

I was fortunate enough to grow up at pretty much the right time for the Voyager space probes. I was young enough to be really enthusiastic about the pictures , but old enough to appreciate some of the science behind them.
Voyager 2 flew past all four of the gas giants in the solar system. All this on just one big push from Earth, with a few tiny mid-course corrections. The Voyager spacecraft endured the harshness of space astoundingly well. And even when problems occurred, the ground controllers were able to overcome them. Voyager 2 had a tremendous number of technical problems, but thanks to improvements in its programming made after it was already years in space, it was a more useful space probe then than when it was launched. As a result of my interest in the Voyager program, I wanted to make more people interested in it. Therefore, when the Penn State Science Expo came, I built a balsa-wood model of it (approximately 3 feet in its longest dimension). To go with it, I had Astronomy magazines whose covers displayed images from each of the flybys. Many of those images are now available for download as well, and can be found here, at http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov/planets/.

For those of you with some experience with equations and an interest in astronomy, here's a link for a page where I explain a couple of the interesting astronomical problems out there. It's not done yet, but soon it will include sections about: Olbers' Paradox (or, why the sky isn't blindingly bright), and Black Holes.