It's all been a bit space based round here recently, but this video is too good not to share, a Shuttle launch caught on video from an Air Canada flight.

Hat tip: 37 Signals

Sometimes you see things that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

The Deep Impact spacecraft, with it's original mission complete and now undertaking science under the EPOXI moniker, turned it's cameras back towards the Earth from 50 million kilometers away and over the course of several hours caught The Moon transiting The Earth!

Phil Plait sums it up beautifully:

While there is science galore in these animations, I think their real impact is the visceral one from simply seeing them. As Carl Sagan once said: everyone you have ever met, every human who has lived and died, lived out their lives on that blue ball. And yet here we are, in the 21st century, plains apes allowed to evolve and satiate their curiosity, now with the ability to lob metal proxies into deep space, look back, and see ourselves.

Science. I love this stuff.

Astronomy Picture of the Day has the most amazing image of Comet McNaught caught during the Australia Day celebrations in Perth.

Sometimes the sky itself is the best show in town. On January 26, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes.

I had completely forgotten about filling in the form on the NASA site for the New Horizons mission to Pluto, but lo and behold there I am!

Myself and over 430,000 other names have been inscribed on a CD attached to the spacecraft, which is currently approaching Jupiter for a gravity assisted slingshot to the outer reaches of our Solar System. We're due to arrive around July 2016.

Google Mars.