News

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....

A novel Antarctic telescope with 16-m diameter mirrors would far outperform the Hubble Space Telescope, and could be built at a tiny fraction of its cost, says a scientist from the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Sydney.

For the first time, scientists have peered at the stars using the newly installed telescope aboard NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), the largest airborne observatory in the world.

A stunning image released this week by the Gemini Observatory captures the graceful interactions of a galactic ballet, on a stage some 300 million light years away, that might better be described as a contortionist's dance.

Scientists who conducted the preliminary assessment of the Genesis canister are encouraged by what they see. They believe it may be possible to achieve the most important portions of their science objectives.

A nearby galaxy cluster is facing an intergalactic headwind as it is pulled by an underlying superstructure of dark matter, according to new evidence from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Here's the latest advaisory, straight from NOAA...