Carnival of Space #284!

Welcome to the Carnival of Space! This is my second time hosting the Carnival; you can find my first Carnival here. The Carnival is a weekly round-up of space stories from around the internet. If you've got a space-related blog, you too can join the Carnival of Space. Email carnivalofspace at gmail dot com to host, share a story you wrote, and to get to know other space bloggers. 

Source: pintrest.com.

This week's carnival will take you on a voyage around the world; into outer space; to the distant and not-so-distant past... and will explain how you can get there!

Travel to the Sahara Desert: Links through Space shares the story of the Astronomy Club Toutatis's recent trip to Morocco, where club members viewed the club's namesake asteroid, Asteroid 4179 Toutatis, in the night sky over the Sahara. More stories on their trip (and photos!) can be found here.

Watch our moon travel in front of the star Spica, and watch an asteroid fly by the Earth: Astroblogger shares photos and details on his observations of the moon's recent occultation of the blue giant Spica. Also on Astroblogger, you can read the good news that imaging of Asteroid Apophis on its recent flyby proves that that asteroid definitely won't hit Earth in 2036. 

Source: ebay.

Travel to Canberra, Australia: Cheap Astronomy is dedicated to exploring outer space for free (or nearly free). They've posted a podcast answering listeners' questions on a variety of topics.

Secretly fly into low Earth orbit: Weird Warp reports on last week's launch of the U.S. Air Force's secretive X-30 7B space plane. It's a very interesting overview of what's known of the craft's missions and specs.

Source: pintrest.com.

Voyage to the Winking Demon: Hablo español? Vega 0.0's Spanish-language post explains how to observe a stellar eclipse in the Algol star system. (An Algol is a demon, hence the system's creepy nickname, "winking demon.")

Travel almost a thousand light years away: Chandra X-Ray Observatory shares observations of the Vela Pulsar, a relatively young pulsar that's a little less than 1,000 light years away. You can also watch a movie of the Vela pulsar spinning! It is turning at a rate of over 11 rotations a second- which is faster than a helicopter rotor!

Source: juxtapost.com.

Journey into NASA's past: NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center might be renamed in honor of Neil Armstrong. But who was Dryden, anyway? The Once and Future Moon shares the story of Hugh Dryden's life, and his significant contributions to aeronautical engineering.

Time travel into the ancient past: Supernova Condensate takes readers a few billion years into the past, to examine new evidence that ancient Mars may have been a watery, Earth-like world.

Source: tentimesone.com.

How might we voyage beyond our solar system? Next Big Future covers the work of researchers seeking to use the Mach Effect to create propellant-less space travel and possibly even to travel via wormholes. Also at Next Big Future you can also read about the electric sail, a propulsion method that features electrically charged  metal tethers that interact with solar wind.

End your journey back on Earth, landing on a dirt road. My latest post tells the story of the one time a space shuttle landed on the dried lakebed runway at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.