News

The Huygens probe will usher in 2005 with its landmark mission at Titan. After a seven-year journey strapped to the side of the Cassini Orbiter, Huygens will be set free on Dec. 25, 2004. The Probe will coast for 21 days en route to Titan.

Just when astronomers thought they might have dug up the last of our galaxy's "fossils," they've discovered a new one in the galactic equivalent of our own backyard.

Orion's 10" SkyQuest dobsonian mounted scope caught this reviewer's fancy and he shared his hits and misses on this scope in this week's winning review...

Astronomers using the Gemini North and Keck II telescopes have peered inside a violent binary star system to find that one of the interacting stars has lost so much mass to its partner that it has regressed to a strange, inert body resembling no known star type...

Four hundred years ago, sky watchers, including the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler, best known as the discoverer of the laws of planetary motion, were startled by the sudden appearance of a "new star" in the western sky, rivaling the brilliance of the nearby planets. Modern astronomers, using NASA's three orbiting Great Observatories, are unraveling the mysteries of the expanding remains of Kepler's supernova, the last such object seen to explode in our Milky Way galaxy.

"Now you can put the finishing touches on your astrophysics education, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology no less, and you won't have to leave home to do it... and it's FREE!

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., selected Northrop Grumman Space Technology, Redondo Beach, Calif., as the contractor for co-designing the proposed Prometheus Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) spacecraft. The contract award is for approximately $400 million, covering work through mid-2008.

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have discovered a frigid reservoir of simple sugar molecules in a cloud of gas and dust some 26,000 light-years away, near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. The discovery suggests how the molecular building blocks necessary for the creation of life could first form in interstellar space.

For more than 400 years, astronomers both professional and amateur have taken a special interest in observing Mira stars, a class of variable red giants famous for pulsations that last for 80-1,000 days and cause their apparent brightness to vary by a factor of ten times or more during a cycle....

Anacortes Telescope & Wild Bird held it's first annual OPTICS AND IMAGING EXPO yesterday and one of the visiting participants sums up his impressions in this report...

Astronomers have used an X-ray image to make the first detailed study of the behavior of high-energy particles around a fast moving pulsar. The image, from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, shows the shock wave created as a pulsar plows through interstellar space at supersonic speed. These results will provide insight into theories for the production of powerful winds of matter and antimatter by pulsars...

Detailed analyses of mankind's deepest optical view of the universe, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), by several expert teams have at last identified what may turn out to be some of the earliest star-forming galaxies...

Potentially Hazardous Asteroid Toutatis misses the Earth.

<b>Editor's Note:</b> None of the astronomical imaging programs I have allow me to do simple "blink" comparisons between 2 different images and though this simple FITSview program is far less sophisticated than, say, MaximDL, it does a good basic job of displaying .fit files AND it has a "blink-comparator" feature. Very handy when hunting for singular disparities between images.

The "Cat's Eye" nebula like you've never seen it before....