lunar

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

Best Buy scraps its restocking fee policy

Google TV may not be ready for its closeup when the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show kicks off next month

The Privacy Bill of Rights aims to regulate companies' data collection practices

The U.K. government wants to make all pornography opt-in only

Google's PowerMeter can now track your home energy use via your home broadband if you have a PowerCost Monitor

TellMyGeo is the app version of "I've fallen and I can't get up!"

And don't miss tonight's lunar eclipse … Read more

If you're like me, you tend to forget to look at the sky when interesting things are happening. Tonight there will be a total lunar eclipse that will make the moon look red for 72 minutes, and I am hoping to catch it.

To help people see the show and learn about the event, Southern Stars is releasing the latest version of its SkySafari Lite iPhone app for free through December 21. The app correctly predicts when the eclipse will happen and displays it, along with additional information.

SkySafari Lite runs on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad and … Read more

A rare drama will play out in tonight's skies: a full lunar eclipse on the winter solstice.

The last one occurred in 1638, according to NASA, and tonight's may be only the second one in the last two millennia.

"Since Year 1, I can only find one previous instance of an eclipse matching the same calendar date as the solstice, and that is 1638," Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory, who inspected a list of eclipses going back 2,000 years, said on NASA's solstice lunar eclipse page. The next lunar eclipse on … Read more

While NASA prepares its next Martian rover to launch in 2011, other minds on Earth are developing an alternative means to explore the Red Planet. Instead of roving, why not hop around Mars and cover a lot more ground?

Draper Laboratory is developing a concept vehicle that would land on the Martian surface and then propulsively leap to interesting spots, traveling miles with each hop.

In a recent release, Draper says that two hopper vehicles could cover a total of 25 miles on Mars in only a few hours or days. As of September 8, NASA's Spirit and Opportunity … Read more

Between 1966 and 1967, the U.S. launched a series of five unmanned Lunar Orbiter missions that photographed and mapped 99 percent of the lunar surface. The spacecraft, equipped with a dual-lens Kodak camera, captured both a 610mm high-resolution image and a 80mm wide-angle low-resolution image and placed the two exposures on a single roll of 70mm film.

In orbit, the onboard system developed the film, scanned the images into a series of strips, and the analog data was then transmitted to NASA back on Earth where it was written to magnetic tape, stored away, and nearly forgotten.

Now, more … Read more

If you live either in the central or western regions of the United States, get up early on Saturday. It'll be worth the extra effort, and you can always take a nap later.

With the exception of the East Coast, a partial lunar eclipse will be visible starting around 3:17 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time, and will reach its peak about 80 minutes later. As Earth's long shadow falls across the Moon, the part in the shadow will turn dark. It will look as though a chunk were missing from the Moon.

StarDate Online has more on … Read more

NASA's plans to visit the moon may be shelved for the time being, but that doesn't mean that you can't take a trip to the lunar surface. And you won't even need to get fitted for a space suit.

NASA and the Citizen Science Alliance on Tuesday announced Moon Zoo, a project to essentially crowdsource the examination of a large set of high-resolution images of the moon in a bid to answer some of the most burning scientific questions about the big rock orbiting us every 27.3 days.

Moon Zoo users will view new images … Read more

In recent years, the U.S. role-playing game landscape has become decidedly dominated by Western-based games, like Mass Effect 2 and the recently released Dragon Age: Origins. But according to Greg Zeschuk, co-founder of role-playing game company BioWare, Japanese developers might have only themselves to blame.

Speaking in an interview with Destructoid, Zeschuk said "the fall of the Japanese RPG (JRPG) in large part is due to a lack of evolution, a lack of progression." Zeschuk added that developers "kept delivering the same thing over and over. They make the dressing better, they look prettier, but it'… Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--There I was, staking my claim to a pilot's slot in one of NASA's next-generation lunar landers, and to be perfectly frank, I think I'd better not quit my day job.

"I think we probably walked away from that," said NASA aerospace engineer Eric Mueller, after one rough touchdown. It was an overly charitable assessment of my performance. I'd hate to know what he was really thinking.

If you've been paying attention, you're probably aware that there are no current missions to the moon, and so you know that … Read more