Professor Lawrence Krauss

 Lawrence Krauss is a physicist and cosmologist, but is best known as a popularizer of science. In this lecture, the finale of the Origins Symposium, he describes the progress made to date in Cosmology – including the amazing fact that we can now put a very accurate date on the age of the Universe! 13.7 billion years to be precise. How is this possible? Watch the video above to find out.

Brief Biog:-
Lawrence M. Krauss is Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and Physics Departments and Beyond Center, and Director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University. An international leader in cosmology and astrophysics, he is the author of over 250 scientific papers and seven books, including The Physics of Star Trek, and has been awarded the highest awards of the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the American Institute of Physics.

And yes, I still wish I had a better camera . . .
But if you want some good astronomy you might try one of the following: -

Astronomy picture of the day

NASA picture of the day

We normally only see Saturn from the “sun-side”, but the Cassini probe recently took this sublime image from the far side of Saturn looking back towards the sun. And with Saturn eclipsing the sun we see the rings in a way we never have before. Firstly you’ll notice how translucent the rings are when we see them through direct light and not the reflected light that usually illuminates them. Secondly you’ll see the outer rings which are normally not visible, but this view of the “F-rings” lets you see exactly the sheer scale involved.
And that little dot on the left between the regular rings and the F-ring? That’s us on earth that is!!!

This is obviously a composite image of the earth at night. What struck me about this pic is that it speaks volumes about the global distribution of wealth versus the distribution of human population.

Our nearest galactic neighbour – the Andromeda Galaxy. I just love the resolution and detail of this photo from Oct 2002. The apparent tranquility of this scene belies the fact that a super-massive black hole resides at the center of this and most other galaxies, including our own Milky Way. At once the black hole both supports the galaxy with a gravitational center and violently consumes it, releasing vast quantities of energy in the x-ray and Gamma-ray spectrum.

Click here to view the embedded video.

From the macro to the micro, from the universe to quark. ”Powers of Ten” is a 1977 short documentary film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten.