Moondark 12.08 (140) - February '09 by Doug Miller

Moondark for February: The Astro-Blog-O-Sphere

If you haven’t explored the universe of blogs on astronomy, it’s definitely worth a look. In my mind, this astro-blog-o-sphere has become the source of astro news and information: it is current, all-inclusive and frequently opinionated. While certainly not replacing my favorite sites such as APOD, S&T's Sky at a Glance, Clear Sky Clock, spaceweather.com, SPACE.com and USNO for timely and authoritative information, the astro-blogs are a great way to stay on the leading edge of what’s up in astronomy and space exploration.

“Blog” is a contraction of “web log,” a web site that holds text entries of stories, reflections, opinions and commentary, descriptions and events. It is usually written by one person, and the text often contains hyperlinks, photos or even video. Postings are provided in reverse chronological order, with the most recent at the top, and they are tagged with keywords to facilitate searching and retrieval. Like many technical words, blog is also a verb, the act of maintaining and posting to a blog. Blogging is a social medium and posts are usually followed by comments from blog readers expanding discussion of the post topic. Blogging ranges from lone voices on the web to the mass media. In fact, blogging as popular journalism was an important force shaping opinion, understanding polling and covering the recent presidential election.

There is an astronomical number of blogs, certainly over 100 million. No surprise then that there are blogs featuring astronomical topics. Alan Boyle, MSNBC.com’s science editor serves up several postings each day on his Cosmic Log, an award winning and definitely worth following site. Each of the 500-word postings is illustrated with an attractive graphic and extensive links to further information. Alan covers a wide array of technical and scientific topics, even society and politics at times. Some of my favorite postings come under the heading of “Weekend Field Trips on the Web.”

Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy is another popular blog now hosted by Discover magazine, and despite the name definitely is not focused on astronomical mistakes and misconceptions. Phil’s blogs are typically brief and comments are often numerous and opinionated, sometimes blunt. Reading these comments reminds me of the USENET newsgroups of the 1990’s

With a little time spent searching the web, you can easily find more blogs than you could ever follow. Many blogs have the option of an RSS feed by linking with a feed reader, which may be a separate program or just a dedicated web page from within your browser. The feed provides only the post title and a short summary, and it keeps track of what entries you’ve previously read. Clicking through will take you directly to that blog posting.

Another way is to let your fellow bloggers help locate the best postings on the web. There are blog aggregators or “planets” where posts from featured contributors appear on a single web page, usually on focused topics. Planets are especially popular among geeks and tech-savvy groups. Bloggers often include a list of their favorite blogs in a sidebar on the web page, (also known as a link-list or blog-roll), and that is another great way to uncover other blogs you too might enjoy.

The Carnival of Space is a weekly aggregation of blog postings (currently at #86) that travels among blog sites. Started in 2007 by UniverseToday, many of the bloggers are themselves astronomers or professional scientists. So you get the latest results, explained and digested, and considerable insight into astronomy as a profession. And just about everything else. But if you are interested in a particular recent scientific talk or paper (societies and journals feed these to the media for maximum exposure), some blogger, somewhere is writing about it and more than likely, you'll find something interesting here.

I’m not entirely clear that any of the bloggers I follow actually go outside and enjoy the night sky—as beautiful as it can be. I can only suppose they are too busy blogging. So there’s a niche for some stargazer, and getting started in blogging is free. Google’s Blogger seems to be where many blogs reside, and it couldn’t be easier to begin blogging. There are many default templates, and the site allows for limitless customization of the layout, color theme and graphics.

Whether you follow a mainstream blog site, sample the postings of aspiring astronomers, or even blog for yourself, you’re sure to learn something that expands your horizons in the astro-blog-o-sphere.

Doug occasionally posts to assorted blogs, but follows many more as a scientist, computing enthusiast and as a stargazer. Moondark is written by Douglas C. Miller, published at the Moondark web site, and printed in the Delmarva Star Gazers' Star Gazer News. This document was last revised on 25 January 2009 . Text and graphics on this web page are free for non-commercial use with attribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 3.0 License. Ask Doug about other uses.