Just bought a new 19" flat screen monitor that's big, bold, and beautiful. And what better way to break it in than some new pictures from space. I'm giddy. Earlier today the Deep Impact mission successfully slammed a coffee table-sized probe into the comet Tempel 1 to analyse the ejecta. The comet is a dirty snowball that has been sitting around peacefully since the time that the planets formed, so analysing what it's made of should tell us lots about the early solar system. Great work folks!

Update: Now with video. How did you picture a comet to look like, up close? I really had no idea. There's no sense of scale in the video, but the thing is about half the size of Manhattan. I've never thought of comets as things you could walk around on.