MetaFilter posts tagged with Telescope

Much Cooler Than Ceiling Cat!

cjorgensen — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:45:18 -0800

There's ceiling cat, then there is this! Be sure to watch the video. (via.)

BLAST

kudzu — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:59:43 -0800

A "Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimeter Telescope" ( BLAST) has made 2 science flights. The documentry Blast! is as much about science as it is about the crazy life of scientists. wiki, Sweden launch, Paul Devlin, the producer, has more video's on his You Tube site.

Jupiter under fire

flug — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 00:02:21 -0800

Sunday morning amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley captured a photo of an apparent asteroid or comet strike on Jupiter. Alerted by the announcement on the ALPO-Jupiter email list, other amateurs soon posted follow-up images. Coincidentally, the discovery came exactly fifteen years after Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit Jupiter, leaving a series of black impact clouds similar to the one discovered by Wesley. If you're interested in keeping abreast of the latest observations of the planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, the Sun, the Moon, comets, minor planets, and so on each have their own page and email list on the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers web site. If you have a small telescope you can observe the impact yourself--Jupiter is perfectly placed for observing just now, rising about 10PM and setting about 8AM. Locater charts & info here. (Note that some of the Jupiter photos also show the shadow of a moon, which is close to perfectly circular and near Jupiter's equator. The impact crater is near the south pole, which is at the top of most images. The impact crater is dark, but not as dark as the moon's shadow, and slightly fuzzy.)

Liquid mirror telescopes

Upton O'Good — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:08:11 -0800

A liquid mirror telescope is made by spinning a reflective fluid, such as mercury, at a constant rate. This rotation produces a parabolic surface, which is an ideal shape for a telescope mirror. (You can try this yourself.) While these mirrors can be built to be large and orders of magnitude cheaper than solid mirrors, they have the disadvantage that they can only look straight up. Creating mirrors this way is not new; they have a history [.ps] that dates back to Newton. However, they have recently regained attention as the technology behind proposals to build an enormous (20m+) telescope on the moon. (A less technical treatment here.)

Telescope making

Upton O'Good — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:59:45 -0800

Mark VandeWettering makes telescopes, and has written a set of guides for those who would like to build their own. Francis O'Reilly has made a similar set of guides, except as a series of videos.

A Star is Unborn

Kronos_to_Earth — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:30:57 -0800

“Here was an object brand new. At first we didn’t recognize it.” Dr. Alicia Soderberg on the discovery of Supernova 2008D, using the Swift satellite telescope....

Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope

stbalbach — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:27:42 -0800

Microsoft's much anticipated WorldWide Telescope was released today (in the past hour actually). Article in New York Times and TED speech.

Stars In Your Eyes

Miko — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:36:12 -0800

See Saturn this Saturday April 12 is the second annual International Sidewalk Astronomy Night, a worldwide event coordinated by the Sidewalk Astronomers. The group, founded in 1968 by John Dobson (subject of this documentary), is dedicated to a sort of guerrilla astronomy -- experienced stargeeks bringing their really good telescopes out to places where people are. So even on your way to the bars, the shows, and the honky-tonk you can see stuff like this and this - like these people did.

Searching for Dark Matter

Burhanistan — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:55:02 -0800

Scientists at Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole have begun searching for the elusive dark matter using the South Pole Telescope. The Station has been visited here before, but not in this context.

HobbySpace

Upton O'Good — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 00:22:33 -0800

HobbySpace hosts an exhaustive collection of information and links about space-related hobbies, including amateur astronomy, satellite design, and rocketry for both beginners and experts.

Porter Garden Telescopes

mcwetboy — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 16:19:59 -0800

In addition to his work on the design of the 200-inch Hale telescope, amateur astronomer Russell W. Porter (1871-1949) designed and produced a remarkable, bronze-cast garden telescope in the 1920s. Fewer than 60 of these unusual Newtonian reflectors were ever made, and they're even harder to find now: earlier this year, one went for $18,000 at auction. But a reproduction of the Porter Garden Telescope is now available, for a mere $59,000 (it's cast bronze on a marble pedestal); a local cable station has a profile of the people behind it. Via Sky and Telescope.

Billions and Billions

Blazecock Pileon — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:38:08 -0800

Billions and Billions astrophotography CCD gallery / film gallery / equipment / tutorials

Best of the Webb

BlackLeotardFront — Fri, 11 May 2007 08:38:41 -0800

"Clearly we need a much bigger telescope to go back much further in time to see the very birth of the Universe." The venerable Hubble space telescope is going to be replaced by what looks like a honeycomb on a box of chocolates. Of course, if it takes more pictures like this (XL), nobody is going to complain about its looks.

Cake to person ratio = infinite

WolfDaddy — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:18:53 -0800

To celebrate the 17^th birthday of the Hubble Space Telescope, please feast your eyes on a very detailed (Flash) picture of the Carina Nebula.

Big Science, Cold Science, Blog Science

geos — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 20:35:26 -0800

Welcome to the South Pole Telescope blog.

Planet-hunter probe "Corot"

stbalbach — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 07:36:31 -0800

France launches planet-hunting probe "Corot", the first spacecraft able to detect rocky planets down to about twice Earth's size. Its 2.5 year mission will be to seek out new planets from a field of about 200,000 nearby stars.

Oh my god, it's full of stars...

Orange Goblin — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 07:05:59 -0800

Pictures from the Hubble telescope

telescope worthless by 2050

goldism — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 09:41:13 -0800

via BBC Ground-based astronomy could be impossible in 40 years because of pollution from aircraft exhaust trails and climate change, an expert says.

SLOOH - Access a high powered telescope from your desktop

Fozzie — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 08:58:58 -0800

Play with the big boys of astronomy by accessing a high powered telescope online.

Hubble Birthday Gallery

peacay — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 08:00:05 -0800

Hubble's 15th Birthday Image Gallery
Reports about birthday.
NASA Hubble site.
(previous) via

Lifehacker

mcstayinskool — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 08:56:40 -0800

Lifehacker is a fairly new addition to the Gawker Media family of blogs, publishers of another personal favorite in the Gizmodo gadget blog. Lifehacker posts articles on how to do all sorts of things better/quicker/cooler/cheaper:

In its three short weeks of life, Lifehacker has given me good tips at a shockingly high frequency. Of course, the whole thing comes full circle with their frequent Ask Metafilter Roundup posts.

The Hubble gets a reprieve...maybe.

wsg — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 11:00:23 -0800

They're going to try to save the Hubble telescope after all! Yea!
Nasa chief Sean O'Keefe has asked for a firm mission proposal to be worked up in a year, after which a decision whether to proceed will be made.

As discussed previously in this thread, it looked like NASA didn't want to devote the resourses necessary to maintain the 14 year old telescope.

Hubble harvest 100 new planets

stbalbach — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 22:31:39 -0800

Hubble harvests 100 new planets during a 7-day sweep of the bulge of the Milky Way.. If confirmed it would almost double the number of known planets to about 230. "I think this work has the potential to be the most significant advance in discovering extra-solar planetary systems since the first planets were discovered in the mid-1990s."

The Hubble Space Telescope is no more.

pineapple — Fri, 16 Jan 2004 13:01:27 -0800

"The end of an era in deep space exploration draws to a close. The era of the total militarization of space dawns," says the blog of Bruce Garrett, a software engineer for the Space Telescope Science Institute (home of the Hubble). Although I haven't been able to corroborate it at a news source yet, Garrett reports that the word came today from NASA director Sean O'Keefe that servicing missions to Hubble are over.

The President made his announcement on Wednesday, and NASA announced their reorganization in order to fall in line with Bush's plan today. Interestingly, this "reorganization" including support to only manned missions began over a year ago, but O'Keefe still testified to the US Senate in May 2003 that the Hubble would be serviced next in November 2004. Wonder what changed.

We marveled at The Best of Hubble in December 2003. Might be the Last, as well.

Spitzer Space Telescope

homunculus — Sat, 20 Dec 2003 00:33:46 -0800

The first images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly known as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility and renamed after astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer, Jr., were released on Thursday. Launched on August 25, it obtains images by detecting the infrared energy radiated by objects in space, and it will drift behind the Earth as the planet orbits the sun.