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aamukherjee A Slice of Entropie -
alchymista Alchymista -
crownedrose Fading Like A Dead Star -
expose-the-light Quarks to Quasars -
ikenbot CWL -
abluegirl A Blue Girl -
perscientiamlibertas A Matter of the Most Pleasant Fraternal Confidence
When Gemini Sends Stars to Paranal
From a radiant point in the constellation of the Twins, the annual Geminid meteor shower rained down on planet Earth this week.
Image Credit & Copyright: Stéphane Guisard (Los Cielos de America), TWAN
Recorded near the shower’s peak in the early hours of December 14, this skyscape captures Gemini’s lovely shooting stars in a careful composite of 30 exposures, each 20 seconds long, from the dark of the Chilean Atacama Desert over ESO’s Paranal Observatory. In the foreground Paranal’s four Very Large Telescopes, four Auxillary Telescopes, and the VLT Survey telescope are all open and observing.
The skies above are shared with bright Jupiter (left), Orion, (top left), and the faint light of the Milky Way. Dust swept up from the orbit of active asteroid 3200 Phaethon, Gemini’s meteors enter the atmosphere traveling at about 22 kilometers per second.
ikenbot
Evening Twilight over the dome of 2.5-meter Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma, Canaray Islands. — Nik Szymanek
December 11, 2012: This intriguing image does not depict a deep-space scenario, nor a microscopic terrestrial subject.
Credit: Patrick Dumas/Look at Sciences
Rather the shimmering light whorls are reflection patterns of a gold-plated spare mirror of ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope. XMM-Newton space telescope, launched in 1999, carries 3 X-ray telescopes and an optical monitor, the first flown on a X-ray observatory.
Although this image might at first look like abstract modern art, it is in fact the result of a long camera exposure of the night sky over the Chajnantor Plateau in the Chilean Andes.
As the Earth rotates towards another day, the stars of the Milky Way above the desert stretch into colourful streaks. The high-tech telescope in the foreground, meanwhile, takes on a dreamlike quality.
This mesmerising photo was taken 5000 metres above sea level on the Chajnantor Plateau, home of the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope, which is seen here. APEX is a 12-metre-diameter telescope which collects light with wavelengths in the millimetre and submillimetre range.
Astronomers use APEX to study objects ranging from the cold clouds of gas and cosmic dust where new stars are being born, to some of the earliest and most distant galaxies in the Universe.
Is the night sky darkest in the direction opposite the Sun? No. In fact, a rarely discernable faint glow known as the gegenschein (German for “counter glow”) can be seen 180 degrees around from the Sun in an extremely dark sky. The gegenschein is sunlight back-scattered off small interplanetary dust particles.
Image Credit & Copyright: Yuri Beletsky (ESO)
These dust particles are millimeter sized splinters from asteroids and orbit in the ecliptic plane of the planets. Pictured above from 2008 October is one of the more spectacular pictures of the gegenschein yet taken. Here a deep exposure of an extremely dark sky over Paranal Observatory in Chile shows the gegenschein so clearly that even a surrounding glow is visible.
In the foreground are several of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescopes, while notable background objects include the Andromeda galaxy toward the lower left and the Pleiades star cluster just above the horizon. The gegenschein is distinguished from zodiacal light near the Sun by the high angle of reflection. During the day, a phenomenon similar to the gegenschein called the glory can be seen in reflecting air or clouds opposite the Sun from an airplane.
World’s Largest Telescope to Crown Europe’s 50-Year Space Legacy
When it is complete, the European Extremely Large Telescope in Chile will be the crown astronomical jewel of the European Southern Observatory, which celebrates its 50th birthday this year.
Image: Artist’s impression of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). Credit: ESO
But construction of the world’s largest telescope will take $1.4 billion (1.084 billion Euros), a decade of work and an iron will on the part of the countries participating.
Most of the 14 member nations of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) are countries stricken by money difficulties sparked by the global recession that began in 2007. This pushed back construction of the 128-foot (39-meters) telescope from an expected start date of this year.
The project was approved in June. Most of the member countries have now committed financially, with the final ones expected to make their approvals in late 2012 or early 2013, ESO officials said.
“We remain confident that the European member states will give the green light,” Lars Lindberg Christensen, an ESO spokesperson, told SPACE.com during an interview from the organization’s headquarters in Germany. “In a situation where you have a slowdown of the economy, you need to invest in research and development. You need to invest in industry.”
Winter Hexagon and Hale Telescope
The Milky way and bright stars of Winter Hexagon (including Sirius, the brightest star in entire night sky) are photographed above Palomar Observatory in the Southern California.
The Observatory is located in north San Diego County, California (the light dome in the south is made by San Diego). Founded in 1930s, Palomar is still a world-class research center. The observatory is home to five telescopes including the 200-inch (5 meters) Hale telescope and its giant dome which is photographed here.
The telescope (completed in 1949) is named after astronomer George Ellery Hale who led the making of the world largest telescopes in the first half of 20th century. Hale telescope was the world largest for nearly 3 decades.— P.K. Chen
NASA’s Prolific Planet-Hunting Mission Goes Into Overtime
NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has begun its extended mission, which should keep the prolific instrument searching for alien worlds for another four years, agency officials announced today (Nov. 14).
Kepler officially embarked upon the extended mission after completing its 3 1/2-year prime mission, which aimed to determine how common Earth-like planets are throughout the galaxy. The extended phase, which NASA announced this past April, funds the instrument through at least fiscal year 2016.
Kepler is staring at more than 150,000 stars continuously. It detects exoplanets by noticing the tiny brightness dips caused when they transit — or cross the face of — these stars from the telescope’s perspective.
NASA’s Prolific Planet-Hunting Mission Goes Into Overtime
NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has begun its extended mission, which should keep the prolific instrument searching for alien worlds for another four years, agency officials announced today (Nov. 14).
Kepler officially embarked upon the extended mission after completing its 3 1/2-year prime mission, which aimed to determine how common Earth-like planets are throughout the galaxy. The extended phase, which NASA announced this past April, funds the instrument through at least fiscal year 2016.
Kepler is staring at more than 150,000 stars continuously. It detects exoplanets by noticing the tiny brightness dips caused when they transit — or cross the face of — these stars from the telescope’s perspective.
The experiment is the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), which is using the 2.5-meter (100-inch) Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope.
The original Sloan survey compiled the most detailed three-dimensional map to date of a large swath of the universe. It used bundles of digital fibers to observe more than one million galaxies. The data included each galaxy’s location on the sky and its distance from Earth.
A team of astronomers used the observations of how galaxies are distributed through space to search for evidence of baryon acoustic oscillations. Observations of 46,000 luminous red galaxies, which are especially bright and red, across several billion light-years of space revealed a slight excess of galaxies that are 500 million light-years apart. This distance is like the crest in a ripple from a rock thrown into a still pond. As the universe expands, the size of these ripples should increase with it, so measuring the size of the ripples at different times will reveal how the expansion of the universe has changed.
Milky Moon
As seen on the National Geographic News from the dark and transparent sky of the highest point on La Palma, Canary Islands, the central bulge of the Milky Way and the setting Moon are photographed over the Atlantic Ocean.
Some of the world’s leading research telescopes are located on this 2400-meter volcanic peak. One of them is the Italian 3.6 meter Telescopio Nazionale Galileo which is visible on the lower right of the image.
Fish-eye view of the winter sky as seen from Kanzelhohe Observatory; a famous solar observatory in the Austrian Alps, near the city of Villach.
Winter Stars above Mount Palomar
Winter constellations from Canis Minor and Gemini (left) to Orion (middle) and Taurus (top) as photographed above Palomar Observatory in the Southern California.
The Observatory is located in north San Diego County, California (the light dome in the south is made by San Diego). Founded in 1930s, Palomar is still a world-class research center. The observatory is home to five telescopes including the 200-inch (5 meters) Hale telescope and its giant dome which is photographed here.
The 200-inch telescope (completed in 1949) is named after astronomer George Ellery Hale who led the making of the world largest telescopes in the first half of 20th century. Hale telescope was the world’s largest for nearly 3 decades.
New findings about an extraordinary galaxy cluster discovered by the National Science Foundation’s 10-meter South Pole Telescope (pictured here), and later followed-up by eight other world-class observatories, appear in the Aug. 16 issue of the journal Nature. — Daniel Luong-Van/
