Gamma ray bursts (GRBs), the brief flashes of light signalling distant, extremely energetic events, have been elusive targets for astronomical observation. (It's something like the fairground game of Whack-a-Mole:by the time you're aware of the GRB, it's vanished, and you have no way of knowing where the next one will appear.) An orbiting observatory that quickly alerts ground-based astronomers about GRBs has allowed a very quick response and an unprecedented look at the GRBs' aftermath.

People where I live still talk about the New Madrid earthquakes that occurred in southern Missouri in 1811 and 1812. I've heard that church bells rang hundreds of miles away in New England, disturbed by the seismic waves, and supposedly the surface of the earth subsided as a result of the quakes to such a degree that it created a new lake (Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee). The aftershocks go on to this day.

I spent part of my childhood in southern California and grew up with the instructions about standing in a door jamb during a quake and all that, so I was used to the idea of California as earthquake-prone, and I understand the reasons for California quakes.

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has produced some of the most famous still images in astronomy (e.g., the pillars of creation in the Eagle Nebula). The latest images from HST are movies of Saturn and its moons. Astronomers wrote software that multiplies the relatively small number of images taken by Hubble for each event into the much larger number needed to make a movie. The original images covered several hours of observing time, and the videos range in length from 15 to 30 seconds, so time is compressed in the videos and the motions of Saturn and its moons are speeded up.

Two of the videos show Saturn with the rings edge-on either to Earth or to the sun.