Review: The Journey to Palomar.

 

Out from PBS!

Any groundbreaking construction project has its own unique tale, and the ascent of some of the great telescopes of the world is no exception. This week, we look at PBS’s landmark documentary, The Journey to Palomar, the story of a man and the rise of American astronomy to pre-eminence on the world scene.
 
Hale in [...]

24.06.10: SOFIA takes flight.

SOFIA in action! (Credit: NASA/Jim Ross).

 
   A unique airborne telescope is now open for business after what has seemed like endless delays. On May 26th, NASA’s SOFIA, or the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy took flight to perform its first nighttime observations of the far infrared sky. And what a long road to flight it’s [...]

20.06.10: The Low Down on WASP-12b.

 
   A bizarre exo-world just got stranger in the past month, but not in the way many news outlets would have you believe. WASP-12b is destined for a short life, one that we many have been fortunate enough to catch it in the middle of. The story starts in 2008, with the transiting exoplanet’s discovery by [...]

12.06.10: Refurbished Hubble Catches Interstellar Speedster.

 
     New instruments installed aboard the Hubble Space Telescope on the final repair mission are now starting to really show their stuff. Recently, astronomers revealed a new find; a massive star speeding away from the Tarantula Nebula. Located 170,000 light years distant in the Large Magellanic Cloud, this nebula is also sometimes referred to as 30 [...]

Review: The Telescope by Geoff Anderson.

 
 
   Few inventions are as near and dear to our hearts as that of the telescope. Before its invention, astronomy was scarcely better than its pseudo-science companion of astrology in its knowledge of predicting the universe as it truly is. In this week’s review, we’ll look at The Telescope by Geoff Anderson out from Princeton Press [...]

The Great Orbiting Observatories II: The Ultraviolet.

 
   When we last left our installment of this saga, we covered the observatories that target the visible edge of our spectrum. This is a narrow slice; a tiny sliver of what we call the electromagnetic spectrum. This week, we move into the ultraviolet, a span of the spectrum at roughly between 10 to 320 [...]

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