28 posts tagged with telescope. (View popular tags)
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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.)
posted on Jul 1, 2008 - View this thread
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.
posted on Jun 4, 2008 - View this thread
“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....
posted on May 21, 2008 - View this thread
Microsoft's much anticipated WorldWide Telescope was released today (in the past hour actually). Article in New York Times and TED speech.
posted on May 12, 2008 - View this thread
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.
posted on Apr 10, 2008 - View this thread
Scientists at Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole have begun searching for the elusive dark matter using the South Pole Telescope.
posted on Mar 30, 2008 - View this thread
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.
posted on Dec 2, 2007 - View this thread
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.
posted on Nov 22, 2007 - View this thread
Billions and Billions astrophotography CCD gallery / film gallery / equipment / tutorials
posted on Sep 14, 2007 - View this thread
"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.
posted on May 11, 2007 - View this thread
To celebrate the 17th birthday of the Hubble Space Telescope, please feast your eyes on a very detailed (Flash) picture of the Carina Nebula.
posted on Apr 30, 2007 - View this thread
Welcome to the South Pole Telescope blog.
posted on Mar 8, 2007 - View this thread
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.
posted on Dec 27, 2006 - View this thread
Pictures from the Hubble telescope
posted on Aug 13, 2006 - View this thread
via BBC Ground-based astronomy could be impossible in 40 years because of pollution from aircraft exhaust trails and climate change, an expert says.
posted on Mar 2, 2006 - View this thread
Play with the big boys of astronomy by accessing a high powered telescope online.
posted on Jun 21, 2005 - View this thread
Hubble's 15th Birthday Image Gallery
Reports about birthday.
NASA Hubble site.
(previous) via
posted on Apr 25, 2005 - View this thread
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:
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.
posted on Aug 11, 2004 - View this thread
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."
posted on Jul 1, 2004 - View this thread
"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.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.
posted on Dec 20, 2003 - View this thread
The Best of Hubble Its mission will end in 2010. Four years later it will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up. Many astronomers are calling for Hubble to be refurbished and its mission extended to 2020. Here are some of it's best pictures.
posted on Dec 10, 2003 - View this thread
Breathtaking Hubble picture of the Sombrero Galaxy (also identified as M104). The Hubble Heritage team took the original images during May and June of this year using the Advanced Camera for Surveys and multiple color filters. They then stitched 6 images together to make the final composite image.
posted on Oct 10, 2003 - View this thread
Listening through a telescope the Chandra X-ray observatory hears a black hole.
posted on Sep 11, 2003 - View this thread
Deep impact. NASA scientists want to know what the pristine inside of a comet looks like. What better way, then, than by blowing a 25-meter crater in one? Comet Tempel 1, to be specific. Even better, send them your name and they'll put it on a disc attached to the impactor spacecraft, which will be launched on December 30, 2004. It'll hit on the 4th of July, 2005.
posted on May 13, 2003 - View this thread
It's nice to know that people can still have big dreams. This is not hallucination; these guys are very serious and very practical and their credentials suggest that they know exactly what they're doing. It's the same team which is just finishing the Very Large Telescope project, which when complete will be the biggest scope in the world, and will be more sensitive and get better pictures than the Hubble. Scopes #1 and #2 are now online, #3 is in engineering shakeout, and first light for #4 is coming shortly. All four scopes will work together to generate images using interferometry.
posted on Jun 17, 2000 - View this thread
Speaking of retrotech, the latest group of space shuttle jockies just upgraded the Hubble to a rockin' Intel 486 chip, replacing the apparently inadequate 386 that previously provided the brains to the wobbly eye in the sky.
posted on Dec 28, 1999 - View this thread
