The 1990s were really the heydey for wonderful but not-quite-convincing space skirmishes. We used to see tons of ships flying around our screen, often too many to count. Unlike Battlestar Galactica's quick cuts and weird handheld camera footage, these 1990s space wars were usually filmed with an unflinching eye or a slow pan, letting you see every computer-generated line and explosion.

And it's totally awesome.

You can compare these massive space shoot-outs to video games, but it's not entirely accurate — because the absolute best of these TV shoot-em-ups have more sensory overload, and you can't even imagine trying to interact with them. (I have seen a few video game cut scenes that approach this level of overload though.) You get ships flying in every possible direction, or a hundred individual starships on screen at once, and all you can do is sit there and drool. It doesn't look real, but your imagination fills in the gaps, which only makes it better.

That's really the key — these space battles are super elaborate and over the top, and that helps them draw on your imagination.

Remember when you used to imagine what a whole fleet of Federation and Klingon Starships flying into battle would look like? And then Star Trek: Deep Space Nine finally gave it to us, and it was completely unreal looking, yet amazing:

It wasn't really until the 1990s when you could have tons of ships flying in formation, like these SA-43 Hammerheads from Space: Above And Beyond:

Possibly my favorite 1990s CG space battles came from Babyon 5, however. They were even cheaper looking than Trek's battles, but even more ambitious. Look how much stuff they pack into every frame of these battles. And every penny they don't have for CG effects is more than made up for by the conviction of the actors:

For people who grew up on space battles as shown on the original Trek, Space: 1999, Blake's 7 or even the first few seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, these dogfights are revelatory. If space battles in the late 1970s and 1980s were all about trying to match the dog-fighting feel of Star Wars, then 1990s space battles were all about massive fleets going at it, sustaining massive casualties and fighting on. And yes, the massive casualties are a big part of why these battles rock so hard — you don't ever quite believe that each of those Federation starships has hundreds of crewmembers aboard, dying every time there's another flare on your screen, but it's still kind of horrifying and exciting to think so.

It really is all about suspension of disbelief — these battles ask more suspension of disbelief from you, but they give more back as well.

Here's some amazing battle footage, showing crowds of ships swarming, in this snippet from Andromeda as well. (Skip the first minute or so of this video):

And some awe-inspiring Farscape action:

And then there's Doctor Who's fake but oh-so-lovely Dalek fleet:

I suspect that we'll see a wave of nostalgia for these 1990s-style fleet-on-fleet battles, one of these days. Just like today, geeks feel nostalgic for guns that went "pew-pew-pew" and models roaring around fake starfields, in another decade everyone will be discovering the beauty of computer-generated space mayhem.

For now, though, the only place you can get this kind of star-fighting (in the United States, anyway) is on Syfy:

Bad Astronomy]

Help me out please! Which episodes should I watch first? Which episodes are absolutely skippable? What do I need to know before plunging into the Andromeda-verse?

We couldn't be more excited for the release of Genesis II, which was one of a few attempts by Roddenberry to create another science-fiction TV show to rival the popularity of Star Trek. Just from the clip above, you can get the flavor of it — like much of Trek, it's preachy and yet cerebral. The Tyranians (their name sums them up, conveniently) are mutants. They have two navels, and they enslave and dominate all the regular humans. That device that Lyra-A (Mariette Hartley) is showing Alex Cord, her stim, is actually like Star Trek's "agonizer," which the Tyranians use to keep the humans in line. So it's sort of giggle-worthy when she says it "confers dignity."

Here's the official description for the DVD, which is exclusively available through the Warner Archive:

"My name is Dylan Hunt. My story begins the day on which I died." Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, brings fans another enthralling tale of the future. Set in a time between now and the era of the starship Enterprise, Genesis II follows Hunt (Alex Cord), who awakes after 154 years of suspended animation into a post-apocalyptic world that's torn between the peace-loving citizens of Pax and the militaristic, mutant Tyranians. Both want Hunt to join their cause. But the Tyranians have two cruel weapons to persuade Hunt: a device of torture called a stim. And an alluring mutant (Mariette Hartley) with two navels…and one ice-cold heart.

"GENESIS II" Starring ALEX CORD Guest Stars MARIETTE HARTLEY TED CASSIDY

And PERCY RODRIGUES As Primus Kimbridge Written and Produced by GENE RODDENBERRY

Directed by JOHN LLEWELLYN MOXEY A NORWAY Production in Association with WBTelevision

This version of Dylan Hunt is a scientist, and not quite as badass as the version played by Kevin Sorbo in Andromeda. But he still manages to see through the Tyranians' pretense of being enlightened rulers. Maybe the pain sticks and the evil name clue him in somewhat. And yet — Mariette Hartley! With two navels!

Genesis II actually aired on CBS, but it didn't get picked up as a series, alas. And it's never been available on home video — until now.

Also being released on Tuesday: Planet Earth, which was Roddenberry's second attempt at making a pilot about Dylan Hunt in the future. In the second version, the role of post-apocalyptic dominatrix is played by Diana Muldaur, who also appeared in the Trek episodes "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" and "Return To Tomorrow," and played Dr. Pulaski in TNG. It also features the monstrous Kreeg soldiers, who have the head-bumps that Star Trek: The Motion Picture's Klingons made famous.

Both Genesis II and Planet Earth will be out on DVD on Tuesday, as part of the new Warner Archive DVD series. So now where's our Questor Tapes DVD?

Writing in the new issue of Nature, the researchers explain that Andromeda is surrounded by a halo of remnants from other galaxies, and this provides evidence for the "hierarchical" model of galaxy development, where bigger galaxies grow by eating smaller ones:

In hierarchical cosmological models1, galaxies grow in mass through the continual accretion of smaller ones. The tidal disruption of these systems is expected to result in loosely bound stars surrounding the galaxy, at distances that reach 10–100 times the radius of the central disk2, 3. The number, luminosity and morphology of the relics of this process provide significant clues to galaxy formation history4, but obtaining a comprehensive survey of these components is difficult because of their intrinsic faintness and vast extent. Here we report a panoramic survey of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). We detect stars and coherent structures that are almost certainly remnants of dwarf galaxies destroyed by the tidal field of M31. An improved census of their surviving counterparts implies that three-quarters of M31's satellites brighter than Mv = -6 await discovery. The brightest companion, Triangulum (M33), is surrounded by a stellar structure that provides persuasive evidence for a recent encounter with M31. This panorama of galaxy structure directly confirms the basic tenets of the hierarchical galaxy formation model and reveals the shared history of M31 and M33 in the unceasing build-up of galaxies.

And here's a cool looking picture of Andromeda's orbit that they released:

Image of Triangulum Galaxy from NASA.

In 2004, a group of scientists at the Isaac Newton Telescope, on the Spanish island of La Palma, noticed "an uneven microlensing event" from the Andromeda galaxy. As New Scientist explains, microlensing is when "a distant source star is briefly magnified by the gravity of an object passing in front of it"; at the time, the 2004 event was thought to be a binary star, but new computer simulations created by a team led by Philippe Jetzer of the University of Zurich - one of the scientists who discovered it - are suggesting otherwise:

[A]ccording to the new simulation, the lensing pattern fits a star with a smaller companion weighing just 6 or 7 times the mass of Jupiter. "It plausibly could be a planet," says Andrew Gould of Ohio State University, who was not part of the team. The matter will probably not be settled, since lensing events occur randomly and do not repeat themselves, and for the foreseeable future, other techniques will be unable to detect planets beyond the Milky Way.

Goddammit, science. Why haven't you invented FTL space travel yet, so we could find out whether or not we really have discovered planets next door already?

First extragalactic exoplanet may have been found [New Scientist]

Heraclitus said you can't step into the same river twice, but that's what Syfy, having adapted Riverworld into a standalone feature in 2003, is trying with next year's more ambitious, four-hour miniseries based on Philip José Farmer's beloved novels. Judging by this Q&A at SciFiWire, however, scribe Robert Hewitt Wolfe (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The 4400) seems undaunted by the prospect of alienating Farmer's loyal readers with an adaptation that ditches the original's storylines and relegates its protagonists to supporting character (or antagonist) status.

The basic premise is the same: deceased humans from across time find themselves living in a watery limbo, a planet-traversing river, where famous historical personages and obscure folk unite to unravel the mystery of their situation. Like the 2003 movie, however, the Wolfe miniseries will push aside the first book's protagonist (real-life Victorian explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton) in favor of a contemporary American protagonist (to be played by Dollhouse's Tahmoh Penikett) with a simple motive: to find his missing love (Smallville's Laura Vandervoort), who died with him in a suicide bombing.

Wolfe (whose strong résumé includes multiple episodes of Andromeda, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and The 4400) suggests that he wants to leave the saga's spiritual and philosophical underpinnings intact, but downgrading the swashbuckling, complex, real-life protagonist to a supporting role because American TV viewers might find him too obscure and unlikable doesn't speak well for the project's literacy and thoughtfulness. In fact, Wolfe hints that Burton may be more of an antagonist than a protagonist. Mark Twain, the hero of the second book, will turn up early on, having managed to build himself a riverboat.

Plus, Wolfe envisions future installments of this possible ongoing series, where he uses Farmer's platform as an opportunity to dig up various historical figures and watch them fight. "I'd love to do a story where the real Macbeth finds out about this play that has been written about him and is freaking pissed off because it makes him look like a dick!" Heh heh. Watch your back, Shakespeare!

Farmer, who died in February at 91, was reportedly upbeat about the prospect of this miniseries. These days, however, he's probably on a steamboat somewhere with Twain and Shakespeare, plotting vengeance.

Here's an old picture of Jupiter's famous red spot, taken by the Voyager spacecraft. According to scientists at U.C. Berkeley, the spot shrunk about one kilometer a day, between 1996 and 2006. We don't know exactly why it's shrinking - or why it changes colors - but it's a storm, and storms have a natural growth and disintegration rate, say scientists.

Meanwhile, it turns out the earliest photographed exoplanet was back in 1998 - a new technique stripped out starlight from a 1998 image to reveal a previously unknown planet orbiting the distant star HR8799. Here's a lovely artist's impression, with the actual image as an inset:

Finally, NASA is digitally restoring and cleaning up images from the lunar probes of 40 years ago, resulting in new images of the moon that include way more detail and depth: