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This review of an upgrade is upgraded to review contest winner.

A gigantic, daisy-shaped space shield could be used to block out pesky starlight and allow astronomers using an orbiting telescope to zero in on Earth-like planets in other solar systems, according to a University of Colorado at Boulder study.

True to our promise of a winner a week (OK, on average) this week's two review contest winners turn their spotting scopes on an 8" achromat and a nice pair of legs....

The most distant cluster of galaxies yet has been discovered by astronomers from the U.S., Europe and Chile. The finding was announced at the 208th American Astronomical Society meeting in Calgary, June 5.

The fundamental constants of physics are believed to remain fixed across space and time -- that's why they're called constants. Now, however, new theoretical models for the basic structure of matter speculate that some of these constants may vary across space and time in different parts of the Universe. A team of astronomers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) are looking for answers by performing tests to see if some fundamental constants have indeed changed.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed two dust disks circling the nearby star Beta Pictoris. The images confirm a decade of scientific speculation that a warp in the young star's dust disk may actually be a second inclined disk, which is evidence for the possibility of at least one Jupiter-size planet orbiting the star.

Researchers using NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) have compared suspected neutron stars and black holes and found that X-ray light emitted from these two types of objects behaves very differently. Black holes always behave as if they have an event horizon and no surface. Matter falling toward the black hole seems to disappear into the void. As expected, the neutron stars appear to have a hard surface, with X-ray explosions ocurring every several hours.

This week's review contest winner weighs in heavily on a 28 inch F/4.

Black holes light up the universe and astronomers may finally know how. New data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory show for the first time powerful magnetic fields are the key to these brilliant and startling light shows.

A pair of small moons that NASA's Hubble Space Telescope discovered orbiting Pluto now have official names: Nix and Hydra. Photographed by Hubble in 2005, Nix and Hydra are roughly 5,000 times fainter than Pluto and are about two to three times farther from Pluto than its large moon, Charon, which was discovered in 1978. <b> PLUS - an update on Hubble's ACS (Advanced Camera for Surveys) downtime issues.</b>

Teams of astronomers at Yale and the University of Southampton have obtained key infrared and X-Ray observations that reveal the nature of quasar particle jets that emanate from supermassive black holes and radiate across the spectrum from radio to X-ray wavelengths, often at velocities very close to the speed of light. These findings are causing a radical rethink of the physics behind relativistic jets that emanate from Quasars and Black Holes.

Celestron NexStar 102 SLT, The Perfect Grab And Go? - Almost

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a region of space where star formation has gone wild. The dusty core of two merging galaxies appear as a single, odd-looking galaxy called Arp 220. This latest view of Arp 220 is yielding new insights into the early universe, when galactic wrecks were more common.

This week's review contest winner seeks to reconcile the qualitative differences between two disparate scope designs in the small and light category...

The Milky Way is moving toward the constellation Centaurus at a velocity of 1.4 Million mph. The motion appears to be due to the gravitational pull of a large, but unobservable, concentration of matter dubbed the "Great Attractor" - a supercluster (or group of clusters of galaxies) estimated to contain mass equivalent to more than 10 Million Billion Suns. Until now, efforts to find the Great Attractor have been hampered by its location in an area behind the plane of the Milky Way where gas and dust within our galaxy block much of the visible light. University of Hawaii astronomers are now using X-Rays to map this region and are arriving at some very surprising conclusions.