Blog Archive
DPS 2012: Double occultation by Pluto and Charon
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/10/26 03:12 CDT | 5 comments
A few talks at last week's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting discussed observations of a double occultation -- both Pluto and Charon passing in front of the same star.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/10/24 01:14 CDT | 7 comments
Continuing my writeup of notes from last week's Division for Planetary Sciences meeting: presentations on the risks of future asteroid impacts. How much risk do we face, and what are the appropriate actions to take in the face of that risk?
DPS 2012: The most detailed images of Uranus' atmosphere ever
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/10/22 04:14 CDT | 3 comments
New ground-based images of Uranus show more finely detailed structure than any photos I have ever seen.
Following up the dark spot on Uranus
Posted by Heidi Hammel on 2012/09/04 06:38 CDT | 2 comments
It was a surprise and delight to have our Icarus paper highlighted in Emily Lakdawalla's blog. Thanks for highlighting Uranus, since it has gotten, ahem, a bum rap over the years. Here's more about our discovery of the dark spot on Uranus.
Optical SETI Gets a Major Upgrade
Posted by Bruce Betts on 2012/08/30 03:57 CDT | 5 comments
The Planetary Society Optical SETI Telescope in Harvard, Massachusetts just got a major upgrade of its electronics. The telescope, which has been operating the only all-sky optical SETI survey since its opening in 2006, is run by Harvard University Professor Paul Horowitz and his team. The telescope scans the sky every clear night with a 72-inch primary mirror, looking for laser pulses as short as one billionth of a second that could be transmitted by distant extraterrestrials. When observing, it has been able to process 1 terabit (trillion bits) of data every second, that’s as much as in all the books in print every second.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/06/28 12:02 CDT
Hang out with Fraser Cain and amateur astronomers all over the world in Cosmoquest's Virtual Star parties conducted over Google+. Here's how -- plus an inspiring video produced by Google to show just how cool this is.











