Venus

Venus is shining brightly above the western horizon this evening. 

Travel Faster than Light with the Alcubierre Drive

In 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a method of stretching space in a wave which would in theory cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand.[1] The ship would ride this wave inside a region known as a warp bubble of flat space. Since the ship is not moving within this bubble, but carried along as the region itself moves, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation do not apply in the way they would in the case of a ship moving at high velocity through flat spacetime relative to other objects. Also, this method of travel does not actually involve moving faster than light in a local sense, since a light beam within the bubble would still always move faster than the ship; it is only "faster than light" in the sense that, thanks to the contraction of the space in front of it, the ship could reach its destination faster than a light beam restricted to travelling outside the warp bubble. Thus, the Alcubierre drive does not contradict the conventional claim that relativity forbids a slower-than-light object to accelerate to faster-than-light speeds. 

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Alcubierre_drive.html

Perhaps in a century or more we may actually be travelling arosss our own solar system, or even the galaxy. 

Draconids Meteor Shower

The Draconids meteor shower will be visible to the north from 8-10 October this year. Best viewed just after sunset, look north to Vega in the Lyra constellation, and it will be just to the southwest.