NASA / SDO

Sunspot region 1476 points toward Earth like a loaded gun in this picture from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. Experts say the active region is capable of generating major X-class flares.

We're not only closing out the week — we're closing out the first 10 years of Cosmic Log. It was on May 13, 2002, that I first began noting the follies and mysteries of science, space and society in this space. To mark the occasion, I'm presenting not just one, not just two, but three sets of brain-teasers.

The first puzzle has already played out on the Cosmic Log Facebook page. I asked Facebook followers to figure out which four-digit number is best associated with the picture above, and it just took a couple of minutes for multiple commenters to come up with the answer: 1476, the designation for the active region that's currently front and center on the sun's disk and capable of throwing X-class flares in our direction.

Mitch Siff was the first to put it all together, and I'm sending him my last pair of sun-viewing safety glasses, suitable for watching the May 20 annular solar eclipse from his home in Colorado. Michael J. Tiano was also quick on the draw, and he'll be getting my second-last pair of 3-D glasses, along with a scary 3-D picture of yours truly.

It's worth noting that a solar storm was one of the first topics tackled in Cosmic Log 10 years ago.

Space Needle unscrambler
Earlier in the week, I reported on the finals of a "Space Race 2012" competition at Seattle's Space Needle that resulted in Arizona law-school student Gregory Schneider winning a future suborbital trip into outer space. The final test was to solve a series of 10 brain-teasers while walking around a narrow ring-shaped platform just outside the Needle's 520-foot-high observation deck. I mentioned a couple of sample questions on Wednesday, but in honor of Cosmic Log's 10th birthday, here's the full set of 10 questions. The first commenter to give the correct answers to all 10 teasers — in a single comment, not a series of comments — will be eligible to receive my last pair of giveaway 3-D glasses.

Unscramble the five following words:

1. PALOLO

2. IODEATSR

3. VGATIYR

4. OEREMTETI

5. EFCRCAPTSA

6. How many stars are in the Big Dipper?

7. For the Space Needle's 50th Anniversary, the roof was painted which color: Orbital Orange, Galaxy Gold, Meteor Melon, Re-entry Red.

8. True or false: The planet Venus rotates clockwise. It is the only planet to do so.

9. Which is NOT the name of a NASA shuttle: Atlantis, Voyager, Discovery, Endeavour.

10. Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong became the first men to walk on the moon in which year: 1968, 1967, 1969, 1966.

Cosmic Log history lesson
Finally, here are some trivia questions about the past 10 years of Cosmic Log. First person to get all the answers correct in a single comment will be eligible to receive a signed copy of my book "The Case for Pluto." (I'm not holding my breath.) 

1. Where did the name "Cosmic Log" come from? A space mission? A TV show? A comic book? Or did I just make it up?

2. Which "Star Trek" actor was interviewed for Cosmic Log? Nichelle Nichols? Leonard Nimoy? William Shatner? George Takei?

3. Which would-be celebrity astronaut was interviewed for Cosmic Log? Lance Bass? Mark Burnett? James Cameron? Victoria Principal?

4. Which Apollo astronaut was NOT interviewed for Cosmic Log? Buzz Aldrin? Alan Bean? Pete Conrad? Harrison Schmitt?

5. Which magician has been interviewed for Cosmic Log? The Amazing Randi? The Amazing Kreskin? David Copperfield? Penn Jillette?

6. Which medium/channel/psychic has been interviewed for Cosmic Log? Mary T. Browne? Theresa Caputo? Allison Dubois? JZ Knight?

7. Which TV show has been the subject of Cosmic Log postings? "American Idol"? "Dancing With the Stars"? "The X-Files"? All of the above?

8. What is the "CLUB Club"? A hangout for Cosmic Log fans in Seattle back in the early days? A concept I proposed for an anti-theft device? A list of book recommendations? A members-only gallery of cosmic pictures?

9. What kind of celestial object got its name in part because of Cosmic Log? Asteroid? Comet? Crater? Mountain?

10. Who was the object named after? Douglas Adams? Alan Boyle? Stephen Hawking? Robert Heinlein?

I'll provide the answers to both of the 10-question teasers on Sunday, the 10th anniversary, and if I'm in a generous mood for the start of the next 10 years, I may give away a book even if no one gets all of the Cosmic Log trivia questions right.

Answers to questions:
Space Needle unscrambler: APOLLO, ASTEROID, GRAVITY, METEORITE, SPACECRAFT, seven stars, Galaxy Gold, true, Voyager, 1969. BigBenAlaska solved all the puzzles and richly deserves a pair of 3-D glasses.

Cosmic Log history: To get the answers to some of these questions, you have to go back to the deep archive at Multiply.com. Julia Cline got all the answers right and is eligible to receive a signed copy of "The Case for Pluto."

1. Cosmic Log's name was inspired by a 40-year-old quote from a character in Weird Mystery Tales #1: "My name is Destiny, and it is my Fate to walk alone throughout eternity and observe the follies and mysteries of mankind, and to note them all in the cosmic log." Among the rejected names: Quanta, Penultimate Questions and the Blog at the End of the Universe.

2. William Shatner was our guest for a Cosmic Log chat on Oct. 14, 2002. 

3. Although Lance Bass was the subject of frequent Cosmic Log items in 2002, I never did talk with Lance himself. I did, however, chat with James Cameron a couple of times about his space aspirations. 

4. I've had items in Cosmic Log about Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 12's Alan Bean, Apollo 17's Harrison Schmitt and other astronauts from NASA's glory days. I interviewed Apollo 12 commander Pete Conrad before his death in 1999 for a story about his Universal Space Lines venture — but that was before Cosmic Log got started. So Pete Conrad is the answer to this one.

5. The Amazing Kreskin was the focus of a 2002 Cosmic Log item about his UFO stunt in Nevada.

6. JZ Knight (who says she channels a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit named Ramtha) was the subject of an extended interview in 2010. I haven't yet checked in with Theresa ("Long Island Medium") Caputo or Allison Dubois of the "Medium" TV series, but I do stay in touch with my cousin Mary T. Browne, "the Wall Street psychic."

7. All of the above: Who hasn't written about "American Idol," "Dancing With the Stars" and "The X-Files"?

8. The CLUB Club is the "Cosmic Log Used Book Club." Since 2002, we've been highlighting books with cosmic themes that have been out long enough to become available at your local library or secondhand-book store. Even though I haven't been providing book club selections as often as I used to, the CLUB Club archive still makes for a pretty good reading list. 

9 and 10. Back in 2003, I discussed the procedure for naming asteroids and solicited suggestions for folks who should have an asteroid named after them. Douglas Adams, the humorist behind the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series, was one of the prospects mentioned — and I noticed that there was an asteroid out there that almost literally had his name on it. The space rock known provisionally as 2001 DA42 included the date of Adams' death (2001), his initials (DA) and the answer to the ultimate question from the Hitchhiker's Guide (42). Astronomer Brian Marsden, who headed the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center at the time, thought it was a great suggestion and helped make it so in 2005. You can get the full story here.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Monika Landy-Gyebnar

Monika Landy-Gyebnar took this picture of the rising sun on May 1 from Veszprem, Hungary. "The image I saw when the sun appeared was incredible!" she said in a posting to SpaceWeather.com. "This was the strongest mirage effect on the sun I have ever seen!" In this image, the mirage makes the sunspot region known as AR 1471 look like three dots in a row, toward the lower left area of the sun's disk.

The next month promises to be filled with astronomical wonders, including this weekend's "supermoon," an annular solar eclipse later this month, and a last-in-a-lifetime transit of Venus. Here are a few images to get you in the mood for those cosmic glories.

Hungarian photographer Monika Landy-Gyebnar snapped an unusual picture of a solar mirage on May 1, showing the sun's distorted disk at the eastern horizon. She told SpaceWeather.com that she expected to see the mirage, because she lives in an area where morning fog usually collects in the valley, "so it is a location colder than its surroundings." The temperature difference often creates a shimmering mirage effect, but Landy-Gyebnar was amazed by the strength of the effect on that particular morning.

"The distortion reached the region where the big sunspot 1471 is located as a visible dark dot," she wrote. "I saw the sunspot disappearing and appearing again, then its mirage appeared above the original spot higher on the solar disk, then a third mirage spot appeared. ... I was shivering with beauty!"

For details, check out Landy-Gyebnar's gallery at SpaceWeather.com and her video clip on YouTube.

The picture above served as today's "Where in the Cosmos" picture puzzle on the Cosmic Log Facebook page, and Brittany Pedersen was the first to figure out that the photo showed a sunspot mirage. To reward her sharp vision, I'm sending her a pair of solar viewing glasses from Astronomers Without Borders. Stay tuned for the next "Where in the Cosmos" quiz on Facebook in a week, and you might win some solar spectacles as well.

Landy-Gyebnar's photographs, and the glasses, serve as good reminders that skywatchers should never gaze at the shining sun without proper eye protection, even during the annular solar eclipse coming up on May 20. To get ready for that rare event, check out my two-part series and "Virtually Speaking" podcast.

Another big sky event is coming up this weekend, when the moon turns full during its closest approach to Earth. That means the moon will be 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than the norm — leading many to call the sight a "supermoon." So much has been made of Saturday night's full moon that Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait is counseling rhetorical restraint (with an artistic assist from Sci-ence's Maki Naro). But even Phil says it's worth going out and looking at the moon, on Saturday night or on any night. "It's bright and silvery and lovely and you can see features with your naked eye and with a telescope you'll see tons more," he writes.

If you have a great supermoon picture to share, please pass it along via msnbc.com's FirstPerson "Sky Highlights" upload page. We'll put together a gallery of our favorite moon views over the weekend.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been looking at the moon lately, in preparation for the transit of Venus on June 5. That's when the planet Venus makes a stately march across the disk of the sun over the course of six hours. The last time Venus did that was eight years ago, and it won't happen again until the year 2117. So the scientists behind Hubble, like many other astronomers, want to take a look.

As explained in today's image advisory, the sun is too bright for Hubble to observe directly. Instead, Hubble's scientists will check the light rays that are reflected by the moon and see whether they can discern the faint signature of the light that passed through Venus' atmosphere.

"Imprinted on that small amount of light are the fingerprints of the planet's atmospheric makeup," the Hubble team said in its advisory. "These observations will mimic a technique that is already being used to sample the atmospheres of giant planets outside our solar system passing in front of their stars. In the case of the Venus transit observations, astronomers already know the chemical makeup of Venus's atmosphere, and that it does not show signs of life on the planet. But the Venus transit will be used to test whether this technique will have a chance of detecting the very faint fingerprints of an Earthlike planet, even one that might be habitable for life, outside our solar system that similarly transits its own star."

Hubble will observe the moon for seven hours on the day of the transit to get a good sampling of spectroscopic data. Here's a practice image of the impact crater Tycho, acquired on Jan. 11: 

D. Ehrenreich / IPAG / CNRS / UJF / NASA / ESA

This mottled landscape showing the impact crater Tycho is among the most violent-looking places on our Moon. Astronomers didn't aim NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study Tycho, however. The image was taken in January as part of the preparation for observing the transit of Venus across the sun's face on June 5.

Finally, here are a couple of videos to end the week with: On one end of the time spectrum, there's an hourlong recap of this week's Space Hangout, in which several space scribes (including yours truly) review the far-out news of the week. On the other end, there's a six-minute mashup of cosmic images from NASA, titled "Pursuit of Light." The montage starts out with Earth imagery, then moves on to shots of the moon, the sun, Mars, Jupiter and its moons, the Saturnian system and asteroids. Then you'll see nebulas, the remnants of supernova blasts, and interacting galaxies. How much farther out can you get?

More far-out imagery:

• NASA probe captures close-ups of Saturnian moons
• Earth's beauty dazzles in astronaut video from space
• Slideshow: Month in Space Pictures for April 2012

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL / Univ. of Arizona

A lava flow in Mars' Elysium Planitia region takes on the appearance of an elephant in this picture from the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, captured on March 19 and released April 4.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured an elephant on Mars — well, actually, it's an elephant-shaped lava flow in Elysium Planitia on Mars.

The picture provides one more Martian example of the phenomenon known as "pareidolia," in which our eyes and brain can be coaxed to see familiar patterns in unfamiliar settings. Pareidolia is the best explanation for the Face on Mars, the Mermaid on Mars ... and even the Happy Face on Mars.

The Elephant Face on Mars also provides a glimpse of the geological changes that shaped the Red Planet over the course of billions of years.

"Flood lavas cover extensive areas, and were once thought to be emplaced extremely rapidly, like a flood of water," University of Arizona planetary geologist Alfred McEwen, the principal investigator for the orbiter's HiRISE camera, wrote in an image advisory issued on Wednesday.

"Most lava floods on Earth are emplaced over years to decades, and this is probably true for much of the lava on Mars as well," McEwen said. "An elephant can walk away from the slowly advancing flow front. However, there is also evidence for much more rapidly flowing lava on Mars, a true flood of lava. In this instance, maybe this elephant couldn't run away fast enough."

This picture served as today's "Where in the Cosmos" puzzle on the Cosmic Log Facebook page, and it took about an hour for Odies Neel to come up with the full story behind the image. Odies will be getting a pair of 3-D glasses in the mail as a reward — as will Seth Deitch and Jonce Matilovski, who came close to the mark.

Over the past six years, HiRISE (which stands for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) has sent back more than 22,000 images of the Martian surface, including 2,444 3-D anaglyph images that should give those red-blue glasses a good workout. Check out the HiRISE website and NASA's Mars exploration portal page for all the pictures.

There's still more to look forward to on the final frontier: Next Thursday, the big event will be Yuri's Night, a space celebration that commemorates the 51st anniversary of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's history-making orbital flight as well as the 31st anniversary of the first space shuttle flight.

The marketing director for Yuri's Night, Veronica Ann Zabala-Aliberto, discussed the past, present and future of spaceflight with me on the "Virtually Speaking Science" talk show, which airs on BlogTalkRadio and in the Second Life virtual world. Give a listen to the hourlong podcast, which you can get via BlogTalkRadio or iTunes — and check out Veronica's screengrab of our avatars sitting together in the Second Life auditorium:

Courtesy of Veronica Ann Zabala-Aliberto

AlanJBoyle Resident and Lunnna Capalini (Veronica Ann Zabala-Aliberto's avatar) sit together in the Second Life virtual world during the "Virtually Speaking Science" talk show.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

This false-color view of Toro Crater on Mars was captured on Dec. 1, 2011, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and released on Wednesday. The different colors reflect different mineral composition on the Martian surface.

There's not much red in this picture of the Red Planet, produced by the high-resolution camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Browns and blues and greens and yellows and violets ... but red? Not so much. There's a method in this colorful madness: The riot of color tells scientists that, mineralogically speaking, this is a wildly diverse region of Mars.

The orbiter took this picture of Toro Crater in Mars' northern hemisphere back on Dec. 1, and the processed version was released just this week. The University of Arizona's Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment or HiRISE, says the different colors point to different kinds of minerals that may have been altered through the action of liquid water and heat on ancient Mars.

HiRISE's views in different wavelengths can be tweaked to tell geologists things about surface composition that you might not notice in a "true color" photograph.

"In general, the blue and green colors indicate unaltered minerals like pyroxene and olivine, whereas the warmer colors indicate alteration into clays and other minerals," McEwen writes in his image advisory. "The linear north-south trending features are windblown dunes that are much younger than the bedrock."

Such hydrothermal alteration could get a closer examination elsewhere on Mars when NASA's Curiosity rover touches down in Gale Crater this August.

For more of this crazy imagery, check out this longer, higher-resolution view of the Toro Crater scene. If you've got red-blue glasses, you'll get a kick out of this 3-D version. The HiRISE home page will point you to thousands of pictures from Mars — some in true color, some in false color, some in black and white, and some in 3-D red and blue. Feel free to go crazy.

S. Robbins / Moon Mappers / CosmoQuest / NASA

This image of the moon shows craters that have been identified by citizen scientists as part of the Moon Mappers project. The blue circles indicate raw IDs by individual users, while the red circles indicate craters identified by a computer program that groups together individual markings.

Where in the Cosmos?
On the Cosmic Log Facebook page, we've been featuring a series called "Where in the Cosmos" — in which we put up a curious space picture for people to puzzle over. Last week, I posted a picture of some cratered terrain with red and blue circles all over it. It took less than 24 hours for Robert Dryden to figure out that the picture showed some of the first results from a citizen-science project called Moon Mappers.

Scientists have long studied craters on the moon to trace the evolution of the solar system. The distribution and estimated ages of lunar craters have led astronomers to conclude, for example, that the inner solar system weathered a hailstorm of impacts known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment" about 4 billion years ago.

Crater counting is a valuable exercise, but it's hard to automate. Moon Mappers, a project presented by the CosmoQuest website, is calling upon the wisdom of crowds to help scientists make sense out of the imagery being sent back to Earth by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Similar citizen-science projects, organized by Zooniverse, have yielded published research — and Moon Mappers is likely to be similarly productive. So if you want to take part in some real science, consider joining the Moon Mappers team.

The moon picture was doubly apt, because of the Moon Mappers angle as well as the past week's political debates over future moon missions. For the latest word in that debate, check out this commentary by NBC News' longtime Cape Canaveral correspondent, Jay Barbree.

I posted this week's "Where in the Cosmos" picture puzzle earlier today, and within an hour several Cosmic Log Facebookers figured out that it was a 3-D view of the Snowman crater chain on the asteroid Vesta, as seen by NASA's Dawn probe. This means that Jarin Udom, Joan Tweedell and Ryan Anthony Sebastian Carroll join Robert Dryden in the winner's circle. They're all eligible to receive 3-D glasses once I get their mailing addresses.

To get in on the next "Where in the Cosmos" puzzle, be sure to hit the "Like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page ... and if you're already a fan, thanks for being part of the community!

More fun with space pictures:

• Jan. 27: 3-D color map of the universe
• Jan. 20: Stephen Hawking's curios explained

Slideshow: Get an eyeful from outer space

ESO / VISTA / J. Emerson / EPA

Gaze into the Helix Nebula's golden eye and see the other cosmic highlights of January 2012.

Launch slideshow

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Sarah Lee / The Science Museum via Reuters

Physicist Stephen Hawking is seen in his office at the University of Cambridge in this photo taken for London's Science Museum in December. The picture is part of a series of photographic portraits commissioned by the Science Museum to celebrate Hawking's 70th birthday on Jan. 8. The pictures are part of an exhibit at the musem celebrating Hawking's life and achievements.

The cosmic curios of the world's best-known physicist went on display today at a London science museum, chronicling the amazing 70 years of Stephen Hawking's life. Over the decades, the quadriplegic genius has popped up in so many pop-culture settings that some of those curios require a little explanation.

That's what we found when we ran a picture of the professor in his Cambridge office as the first installment of a "Where in the Cosmos" series on the Cosmic Log Facebook page. There's such a generous assortment of gewgaws that it's a wonder Hawking gets anything done.

It turns out that the scene was arranged to show off Hawking's stuff for the exhibit at the Science Museum in London. Take the bronze statue on the desk, for example. I was particularly intrigued by the out-of-focus statue because it seemed to hold such a prominent place in the picture.

"I believe the statue is of the pope," Tracey Walters wrote. "But the picture is kinda fuzzy, so who knows which one?" Others wondered if it was the theologian Erasmus, or maybe King Midas.

Hawking's longtime executive assistant, Judith Croasdell, straightened out the mystery in an email.

"The statue is the Fonseca Prize which Professor Hawking received in Santiago de Compestela, in 2008," she wrote. "It normally sits not on Stephen's desk but on the window shelf because it is heavy — 2 kilograms worth of bronze. Obviously it was put on the desk for the photographers."

A less weighty curio is far easier to recognize: It's a plastic action figure of Hawking as he appeared in an episode of "The Simpsons," the animated show that the physicist has called the best thing American television has to offer. The figurine is festooned with the helicopter top and the spring-loaded boxing glove that played their part in the "Simpsons" plot. In the distance, you can just make out a picture on the wall that shows Hawking encountering Maggie Simpson and other characters from the show. Watch this YouTube clip to learn more about Hawking's "Simpsons" connection.

Other items include a little toy computer with sticky notes, a space shuttle model, and a crystal globe. "The crystal globe is a present given by Discovery and shows a map of the world," Croasdell says. "Carved on the globe are the words 'What is essential is invisible to the eye,' [from] Saint-Exupery."

There's a humidifier on his desk that holds an assortment of seashells. The blackboard you see in the picture above is covered with equations scribbled by his students. Another blackboard in the room, not seen here, that has mathematical in-jokes written on it.

Sarah Lee / Science Museum via Reuters

Another picture commissioned by the Science Museum shows Stephen Hawking with a picture of Marilyn Monroe looming over him.

Another photo of Hawking's office, taken from a different perspective, gives prominent play to his picture of Marilyn Monroe, who is one of the professor's favorite personages from the past. "If I had a time machine, I'd drop in on Marilyn Monroe in her prime," he once mused. The room's walls are covered with flyers as well as photos from Hawking's trips around the world.

To find out more about these items and others in Hawking's office, check out Roger Highfield's profile of the professor in The Telegraph.

The photos are just one little piece of the Science Museum's one-room exhibition: Museumgoers can also see pictures of Hawking before his struggle with motor neuron disease, as well as mementos that touch upon the highlights of his long career. The Science Museum's inventor in residence, Mark Champkins, created a "Black Hole Light" in Hawking's honor that uses a swirl of neon tubing to evoke the path photons would take as they fell into a black hole.

Here's a sampling of the sights:

AP

The Science Museum displays a selection of books and papers by British physicist Stephen Hawking. His best-known work, "A Brief History of Time," has been translated into more than 30 languages. The object at right that looks like a model of Saturn is actually the 2010 Cosmos Award, which Hawking received from the Planetary Society. Hawking's Fonseca Prize and Prince of Asturias Award are also on display.

Alastair Grant / AP

A diagram by British physicist Stephen Hawking, titled "Black Hole and Unpredictability," is one of the papers on display at the Science Museum.

Alastair Grant / AP

A marked script from a "Simpsons" episode that aired in 1999 highlights Stephen Hawking's lines, including this one: "Silence! I don't need anyone to talk for me except this voicebox." The Stephen Hawking action figure has a helicopter-style wheelchair and a boxing glove, just like the character on the show.

Update for 12:45 a.m. ET Jan. 21: When the Planetary Society's Charlene Anderson took a look at the pictures above, she saw a familiar sight — the planet-shaped Cosmos Award that Hawking received from the society in 2010. Check out her posting to the Planetary Society's blog, in which she expresses her surprise and pleasure at seeing the society's award in such a place of honor.

Next on 'Where in the Cosmos': Today's picture puzzle focuses on a far-out subject that's been the subject of research recently. I haven't written anything about it yet, but next week I'll fill you in on why it's significant. One of our Cosmic Log friends has already figured out what the picture shows, and as a reward I'll be sending her a copy of John Gribbin's latest book, "Alone in the Universe." To join the conversation, check out the "Where in the Cosmos" posting on the Cosmic Log Facebook page.

More about Stephen Hawking's life and work:

• Stephen Hawking misses 70th-birthday party
• What mystifies Stephen Hawking? Women
• Hawking defies crippling disease at 70
• Hawking's quantum universe

The exhibit celebrating Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday runs through April 9 at the Science Museum in London.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.