News

All About Making Friends - A message from Mike Hosek

This week's review winner takes a look at Meade's entry on the now crowded battlefield of 80mm APO/Semi-APOs. Is this a valiant C3PO or a useless mining droid....

Astronomers from the University of Virginia and other institutions have found that Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn, is a "cosmic graffiti artist," pelting the surfaces of at least 11 other moons of Saturn with ice particles sprayed from its spewing surface geysers.

The existence of black holes is perhaps the most fascinating prediction of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. The immense gravity well that is formed by a black hole is a place where strange things happen. Now, a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has measured a stellar-mass black hole spinning so rapidly - turning more than 950 times per second, or two to three times as fast as the average kitchen blender. For comparison, the fastest speeds of common kitchen blenders are 250 to 500 Hz.

Orion resurrects the Argonaut in this week's review contest winner...

Like most of today’s astronauts, Lisa Marie Nowak worked in relative obscurity — even last July, when she took the spaceflight that she had spent 10 years at NASA hoping for.

About a hundred thousand quasars have been found to date. Among them less than a hundred are close pairs. This is the first known case of a close Triple Quasar system. The odds of finding a Triple Quasar system are, well... Astronomical.

This week's review contest winner critiques a 2-scope support system from William Optics...

The Hubble Space Telescope is flying partly blind across the heavens, a result of a short circuit on Saturday morning in its most popular instrument, the Advanced Camera for Surveys.

NASA engineers are working round the clock on a problem related to Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The observatory entered a protective "safemode" condition and the camera has stopped functioning. It is feared that the ACS may be DOA until a Shuttle servicing mission can either repair or replace it in September 2008.

The Integral Gamma Ray Observatory recently observed the center of our galaxy at a fortuitous moment while the high-energy sources surrounding the black hole all faded to low emmission levels simultaneously. This rare event allowed astronomers to observe the even fainter objects at the galactic center that are normally overwhelmed by the much brighter objects.

This week's review contest winner shines some light on a little scope with a big target...

Astronomers measuring the 3-D velocities of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) have found surprisingly high speeds, which may indicate that the Magellanic Clouds are not gravitationally bound to the Milky Way but instead are "just passing through" the neighborhood.

New, high-precision distance measurements by the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope are providing a major advance for astronomers trying to understand how stars form.

This week's review contest winning author was generously gifted with a Nagler 31mm by his girlfriend. OK, now we know enough about the girlfriend to rate her a 10.0 but what about the eyepiece??