Happy New Year!

The running joke is "Aren't you too short for a Storm Trooper?"

HT from Instapundit a list of space books here.

The top science stories of 2006 here from Florida Today here.

Cassini sends a year to end greeting here.
The movie in quicktime is here.

Saturn's moon Hyperion appears to tumble toward Cassini in this movie that shows variations in color across the moon's surface.

The movie was created from 14 frames and represents about 12 hours as the spacecraft encountered Hyperion in early 2006. Most of the observable motion is due to the spacecraft's trajectory during the flyby.

The dark areas in the bottoms of craters are seen on all parts of Hyperion.

Year three for Mars Rovers here.

Flame Trench Mars Rover Aniversary link here.

Pluto was demoted this summer, here.

"Pluto is not a planet," Brown said. "There are finally, officially, eight planets in the solar system."

The vote involved just 424 astronomers who remained for the last day of a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in Prague.

"I'm embarassed for astornomy," said Alan Stern, leader of NASA's New Horizon's mission to Pluto and a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. "Less than 5 percent of the world's astronomers voted."

"This definition stinks, for technical reasons," Stern told SPACE.com. He expects the astronomy community to overturn the decision. Other astronomers criticized the definition as ambiguous.

The New Horzion mission to the Dwarf planet here.