From left to right: a Nordic, a Reptilian, and a Grey engage in a high stakes game of interdimensional cards. Illustration by Jeremy Kai/Torontoist. When budget cutbacks forced the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) to shut down its Allen Telescope Array earlier this year, it marked the end of an era of publicly funded [...]

Virgin Galactic’s VSS Enterprise and VMS Eve mother ship fly over Spaceport America (near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico). Photo by Mark Greenberg, courtesy of Spaceport America. What ever happened to space tourism? Weren’t commercial spacecraft supposed to make it so regular celebrity multi-millionaires like Lance Bass could experience the wonders of low Earth orbit? [...]

The planetarium’s digital projector, which uses a fish-eye lens to render images on the inside of an inflatable dome. In early 2009, the University of Toronto notably bought the disused McLaughlin Planetarium, attached to the south side of the Royal Ontario Museum, for eventual redevelopment—meaning probable demolition. Last summer, less notably, the university purchased a [...]

The image above is a montage of eighty-six separate thirty-second exposures taken on Woodbine Beach in the early hours of Tuesday morning during the Leonid meteor shower. (Each image was loaded into Photoshop and blended with the images below it to build up the star trails and reveal the meteors.) Over the three-quarters of an [...]

Photo of star trails (not meteors), by xbeta, from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. The annual Leonid meteor shower will peak in intensity tonight and tomorrow night. This year’s show promises to be an exceptionally spectacular one, by recent standards—but only for those who know how to hide from Toronto’s countless jiggawatts of light pollution. Do [...]

Image of DEXTRE courtesy of NASA. Several months ago, a group of young NASA employees set out to redefine what space exploration means for their generation, Generation Y. Unlike the Baby Boomers’ mission to the Moon, our generation’s experience of space has been shaped by things like the International Space Station and the horrific Columbia [...]

In 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to visit space in his ship Vostok 1. Flying high above our blue planet, he remarked, “Circling the earth in my orbital spaceship I marvelled at its beauty. People of the world, let us safeguard and enhance this beauty, not destroy it!” Forty years later, two [...]