Astronomers around the world agree. Exploding Comet 17P/Holmes is one of the strangest things they've ever seen. Little did they know...

Last night, astrophotographer Alan Friedman of Buffalo, NY, took a close-up picture of the comet's core. "A strong deconvolution filter followed by multiple passes of unsharp mask and gaussian blur reveals startling new structure in comet 17P/Holmes."

Last week, Comet 17P/Holmes shocked sky watchers around the world with a sudden million-fold increase in brightness.  It literally exploded into view, rapidly becoming a naked eye "star" in the constellation
Perseus.  Since then the comet has expanded dramatically. It is now physically larger than the planet Jupiter and subtends an angle in the night
sky similar to the Moon's Sea of Tranquility, the right eye of the "Man in the Moon."  Photographers, this amazing comet is an excellent target for off-the-shelf digital cameras and backyard telescopes.  It grows visibly from night to night and no one knows how large it will become.

Would you like to see the comet behind the mask? Look north after sunset for an expanding fuzzball in the constellation Perseus: sky map. Comet Holmes is about as bright as the stars of the Big Dipper, easy to see with the unaided eye and a spellbinding target for backyard telescopes.

Comet 17P/Holmes Photo Gallery

A 3,000-year-old mystery is finally solved: Tutankhamun died in a hunting accident
The mystery behind the sudden death of Tutankhamun, the boy king who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago, may have been finally solved by scientists who believe that he fell from a fast-moving chariot while out hunting in the desert.

Concoctions, familiars, broomsticks
Britain has a long tradition of witchcraft, going back deep into history. As well as offering examples of the plethora of paranormal activity, the subject also shows how the ‘stories’ of witches entered culture and folklore. Often, the vehicle of phenomena was not the witch, but the paraphernalia and ‘assistants’ they used. Usually these were household pets or equipment, or even children, giving a sinister touch to the ‘normal’ parts of life – an essential means of fuelling superstition.

British mediums help find missing soldier’s remains
Soon after her soldier son Blake Hartley went missing in France three years ago, Sally Perrin’s attempts to find him led her to two British mediums, Gordon Smith and Dennis McKenzie. She hoped they would tell her that he was alive and maybe, for whatever reason, had defected and was living happily in Spain or Italy. But both confirmed, independently, that Blake was dead and his body was in a river.

CFZ Guyana monster hunt
On the 14th November 2007, five members of the Center for Fortean Zoology – the world’s largest organization dedicated to the search for mystery animals – leave the UK for South America, on their most ambitious expedition yet. They will be searching the remote swamps and jungles of Guyana. They are looking for three elusive, potentially lethal, and hitherto undiscovered animals.

El Petizo: shadow creature
Cryptozoology is a category of odd "animals" that may or may not exist. Bigfoot is a member of this exclusive group, so is Nessie, a whole bunch of lizard people and loads of other near-mythological creatures. Normally though, sightings of these animals are purely visual with zero physical interaction. Occasionally this changes, and not only does a witness get to see an alleged phenomena, but they get attacked by it too. So it is with El Petizo, a creature sighted in Argentina that is apparently made of shadow. A boy there had to fight him with a shotgun and knife fairly recently, but his weapons were useless.

Jack-O-Lantern

Out of this ancient tradition comes one of our most famous icons of the holiday: the Jack-o-lantern. Originating from Irish folkfore, the Jack-o-lantern was used as a light for the lost soul of Jack, a notorious trickster, stuck between worlds. Jack is said to have tricked the devil into a truck of a tree and by carving an image of a cross in the tree's trunk, he trapped the devil there. His pranks denied him access to Heaven, and having angered the devil also to Hell, so Jack was a lost soul, trapped between worlds. As a consolation, the devil gave him a sole ember to light his way through the darkness between worlds.

Originally in Ireland turnips were carved out and candles placed inside as lanterns lit to help guide Jack’s lost spirit back home. Hence the term: Jack-o-lanterns. Later, when immigrants came to the new world, pumpkins were more readily available, and so the carved pumpkins carrying a lit candle served the same function.

I couldn't resisit adding this joke I heard recently...It seems a mother was at her wit's end trying to get her 6 year old son to stop sucking his thumb.  While they were out one day, and in desperation, she pointed out a large man with a very protruding belly, informing the boy that is what would happen to him if he continued his bad habit. The following day, both are in the grocery store and the boy begins staring at a woman with a large belly who is obviously pregnant. The poor woman finally gets annoyed, looks at the boy and says, "Why do you keep staring at me? Do you know me?" The boy replies with a serious expression, "No, but I know what you did."

See you in the ether !