Google gives a shout out to Copernicus

Check out the google doodle today, celebrating Nicolaus Copernicus' birthday.  More info here.

An asteroid/meteor expert has written about her estimates of the size of the recent meteor over Chelyabinsk, Russia.  The estimate is that the object has a diameter of ~15 m and the blast had an energy equivalent to ~300 killatons of TNT.  Wow.  

Lucky Imaging

This is a nice little video of an amateur astronomer using a technique - "lucky imaging" - that astronomer's are using more and more.  The technique basically takes advantage of the fact that, if you take very short exposures (< 10 ms), occasionally the distortion from seeing is not large.  So if you can take a large number of exposures and only use the sharpest 5-10% of them, you can get an image that is much higher resolution.  Sometimes it can even approach the diffraction limit.  Of course, the method has a downside in that you have to throw away most of the images, most of the photons.  But if the objects you're photographing are bright, you can get away with it.