Here's the latest in the weekly collection of space writing known as the Carnival of Space, in which people with their eyes on the stars go to work to explain the latest findings. Let's start with the Sun, for even as we push our investigations of distant exoplanets, we have much to learn about the nearest star, as our recent discussion of the Solar Probe Plus reminds us. Launching this week's Carnival, Vega 0.0 explains the plasma beta parameter, the ratio of gas pressure to magnetic pressure on the Sun, in an environment where plasma behaves like a fluid. In his Astroblog, the ever reliable Ian Musgrave offers up a review of Stellarium 0.10.6.1. Stellarium, for those not already acquainted with it, is a great, free photo-realistic planetarium program that amateurs should find helpful. Does Ian like it? Evidently so, given his description of the piece as an 'enthusiastic Fan Boi review.' And having worked with Stellarium myself, I can see why he's enchanted with its possibilities....

Because I'm immersed in Laura Snyder's wonderful book The Philosophical Breakfast Club (Broadway Books, 2011), I've been thinking lately about William Whewell. Long the master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Whewell helped bring sound, inductive methods to the fore in the science of his day, created models of international cooperation in scientific investigations through his studies of the tides, founded the discipline of mathematical economics, studied crystallography and, in one memorable episode, became involved in a 19th Century imbroglio over alien life. This morning I want to focus on that incident, but it's just one of the numerous episodes Snyder recounts in her history, which follows four remarkable men -- Whewell, mathematician Charles Babbage, astronomer John Herschel (son of William) and economist Richard Jones -- through a lifetime of friendship and scientific inquiry. What's fascinating about Whewell's brush with the topic of extraterrestrial life is that it reveals how...

All weekend long, as the dreadful news and heart-wrenching images from Japan kept coming in, I wondered how press coverage of the nuclear reactor situation would be handled. The temptation seemed irresistible to play the story for drama and maximum fear, citing catastrophic meltdowns, invoking Chernobyl and even Hiroshima, along with dire predictions about the future of nuclear power. My first thought was that the Japanese reactors were going to have the opposite effect than many in the media suppose. By showing that nuclear plants can survive so massive an event, they'll demonstrate that nuclear power remains a viable option. This is an important issue for the Centauri Dreams readership not just in terms of how we produce energy for use here on Earth, but because nuclear reactors are very much in play in our thinking about future deep space missions. Thus the public perception of nuclear reactors counts, and I probably don't have to remind any of you that when the Cassini orbiter...

Isn't it fascinating how the Voyager spacecraft keep sparking the public imagination? When Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989, the encounter was almost elegaic. It was as if we were saying goodbye to the doughty mission that had done so much to acquaint us with the outer Solar System, and although there was talk of continuing observations, the public perception was that Voyager was now a part of history. Which it is, of course, but the two spacecraft keep bobbing up in the news, reminding us incessantly about the dimensions of the Solar System, its composition, its relationship to the challenging depths of interstellar space the Voyagers now enter. In the public eye, Voyager has acquired a certain patina of myth, a fact once noted by NASA historian Roger Launius and followed up by author Stephen Pyne in his book Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery: ...the Voyager mission tapped into a heritage of exploration -- that was its cultural power. But there was...