A fireball in the sky was spotted over Holland today according to an eyewitness and confirmed by NU.NL.

The Eyewitness reported:

it really was as if a fighter jet was coming over low.. and exploding in the sky… just to give you a visual impression of the brightness and size of that thing

Pictures of the meteor were posted on Twitter within minutes.

The Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute  (KNMI) reported that at 19:05 they received clear indications that a meteorite had passed over The Netherlands. A spokesperson reported it passed over Holland from the North.

Interesting detail: the movie Armageddon was on one of the t.v. channels an hour and a half later.

Thanks go out to Maali for the eyewitness report.

I found an image online which details the advance of human space exploration in the past 50 years. While the image is too large to display here, I’ve provided a link to the original which is, quite frankly, huge. Click on the image to go to the original page.

This should come as no surprise to anyone: Carl Sagan was totally high.

He wrote a book on marijuana along with his many scientific books, as reported by Boing Boing this week:

In 1969, Sagan contributed a piece about his marijuana use for the book “Marihuana Reconsidered.” Sagan wrote under the pseudonym of Mr. X, but he was later confirmed as the author.

Boing Boing goes on to release an excerpt of the book. To show you just how high he was, here’s a music video with him and Stephen Hawking… now that’s high.

British cheese makers who launched a cheddar cheese into space via a weather balloon have lost track of it when the tracking beacon stopped working.

The BBC reports:

The plan was for the balloon to pop at the edge of space, and the cheese to float down to the ground by parachute.

The mission was being made to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first men to land on the moon.

Let’s hope this won’t be our first contact with aliens. They might just think we’re walking ham & cheese sandwiches.

I was reading this article on astronomy which headlined with “Dark impact mark in Jupiters south polar region” from about a week ago.

Needless to say it reminded me of one of my favourite books of all time: 2001 A space Odyssey and its subsequent followup 2010, Odyssey Two by renowned SciFi author Arthur C. Clarke.

One of the articles written about this phenomenon on blogs states:

Giant planet Jupiter is sporting a mysterious black eye, which astronomers believe is the scar from a powerful comet or asteroid impact. The dark spot, about the size of the Earth, suddenly appeared near the planet’s south pole and resembles markings left when a disintegrating comet hit Jupiter 15 years ago.

Does this remind anyone of this?

In 2001 and 2010 monoliths are discovered all across the solar system, apparently left there by alien intelligences who want to steer the human race towards the next step in evolution. The planet Jupiter is ignited as a new sun as proof of their awesome power. Of course real life is often just as interesting, if more (pardon the pun) down to earth in it’s execution.

Scientificblogging’s website quotes:

“It could be the impact of a comet, but we don’t know for sure yet,” said Glenn Orton, a scientist at JPL. “It’s been a whirlwind of a day, and this on the anniversary of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Apollo anniversaries is amazing.”

Needless to say, we’ll keep you informed of any developments or sightings of monoliths. Here’s the trailer from the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey – Directed by Stanley Kubrick.