I thought that I was pretty hot shit when I climbed on a stool and double-sided-taped glowing stars to my ceiling, but their waning green light never captured the night sky like DIY fibre optics.

One home-modder plugged bundles of fibre optics into tiny dremel holes in his ceiling. Using just a touch of glue to hold each star in place, 250 dots twinkle…maybe even brighter than real stars.

Even for a lazy glob of lard such as myself, the install sounds wicked-easy thanks to a step-by-step tutorial over at Instructables. That said, I’m still the type of guy to hire out. [instructables via Hack a Day via lifehacker]

We think we have found a new class of bright, high-velocity stellar interlopers. Finding these stars is a complete surprise because we were not looking for them. When I first saw the images, I said ‘Wow. This is like a bullet speeding through the interstellar medium.’ Hubble’s sharp ‘eye’ reveals the structure and shape of these bow shocks.

So colour NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer Raghvendra Sahai suprised.

With their tails and arrowhead shapes the may look like crazy comets, but these young runaway stars are that, stars moving quickly through space, with their powerful stellar winds pushing the dense gas around them: They travel at 180,000kph, five times as fast as typical young stars. According to the JPL, they are like speedboats through a lake. The only difference is that the waves they generate are 100 billion to a trillion miles wide (17 to 170 solar systems measured up to Neptune).

Hopefully, none of these will decide to pay a visit anytime soon. [Hubble Site]

Located in Livermore, California, the ten story facility—which is also the size of about 3 football fields strung together—houses the world’s largest laser, consisting of 192 laser beams made of hydrogen fuel, the same kind of energy that makes stars shine.

After travelling through almost a mile of lenses, mirrors and amplifiers, the lasers will converge in the centre of the chamber, creating a beam that is 10 billion times stronger than an average household light bulb. Within the chamber, the lasers will create a reaction that can only be found in the core of stars and planets, causing an explosion that will produce more than 10,000 times the electric energy generated by the United States per year. Check out the video below for more details on how the man-made star works. [NIF via Didnt You Hear?]

The 8″ Celestial Globe is fairly typical during the day, spinning like any other spherical map of the Earth while providing the illusion that you care about geography and global politics. But at night, the system’s built-in light sensor illuminates the globe with a map of 88 constellations. The Celestial Globe is available for $US55. [Shop via Craziest Gadgets]

These images will be part of Star Vistas, a book that will be published next year and will collect all their photos of space, taken since they met online four years ago.

The two alien Peeping Toms started to collaborate online when Neil–a Photoshop wizard with an astronomy inclination–helped Greg post-process his images of M33, the Triangulum Galaxy Messier 33, which is a member of our local group of galaxies along with Andromeda (M31, who they also got in their book) and our very own Milky Way.

Greg uses a 28 cm Celestron NExtar 11 GPS reflecting telescope with Hyperstar lens, an optical assembly that attaches to the telescope secondary mirror, turning it from a slow f10 to an ultrafast f2 astrograph. He also got an Starlight Xpress SXV-H9C one-shot colour CCD camera.

To increase the performance of the camera, he had to get rid of the noise in the sensor, which is produced by heat in long exposure times. This is achieved by installing a solid-state refrigeration system that lowers the temperature of the CCD 13º C less than the ambient temperature.

In addition to this, there is a last ingredient in the recipe: Parker moves the dome in his observatory by hand ever half hour, to adjust to the rotation of the Earth, which results in a moving sky.

So in a word: Magic. [Star Vistas via Daily Mail]

This is what the Hubble Telescope saw, conveniently labelled by our friends at NASA. Where is the planet, you ask? Do you see that little underlined part to the right? That’s the unimaginatively named Fomalhaut b! To get the image, Hubble’s camera needed to block out the brightest part of the star, which shines millions of times brighter than the planet itself.

And here’s the picture taken by the Gemini and Keck observatories of the bodies orbiting Star HR8799. HR8799 is about 1.5 times more massive than our sun, and five times more luminous. Like the Hubble’s image, this star needed to have its light blocked too in order for us to see the planets. These two, despite being an even greater distance away, were slightly easier to find since they’re young. Being only about 60 million years old, they’re still glowing from leftover heat from their formation, making them brighter than Fomalhaut B, which only glows when reflecting light from Fomalhaut.

Here’s an artistic rendering of Star HR8799 and it’s planets. The third planet hasn’t been imaged yet, but thanks to mathematical calculations, we know it’s there!

So in case you were doubting it–yes, other star systems exist. And as our galactical camera technology gets better, the pictures will start looking more like actual planets, rather than fetal specs on a giant Eye of Sauron. [Bad Astronomy]

Image credits: NASA and the Gemini Observatory

Check it out: this is the sound of a star called HD49933, and it’s like the sound made by an alien warp engine warming up. HD181420 sounds similar, but more like a generic “spooky” alien planet background noise. But the “song” from a globular cluster sounds really scary indeed, like a futuristic beam weapon getting prepped to vaporise Enterprise.

Coincidence? Menothinkso. Gene Roddenbury was clearly an alien visitor, subtly planting ideas into our collective consciousness. Or something. [BBC News]

The flash in the sky is a remnant of a blast 7,000 light-years away in the Lupus constellation. Scientists say that it was the brightest observed supernova in recorded history, and that the light from the explosion could be seen in the daytime for weeks afterward.

The supernova sent a shockwave that traveled outwards at nearly 32 million kph. In the 1960s, radio astronomers first detected the ring of material pushed out by the shockwave. With the latest imagery, released by the Hubble Space Telescope’s science team, you can see a gossamer stripe with starlight shining through it – the rocket’s red glare indeed.

[Cosmiclog]