Articles

Amir Alexander

Two nearly simultaneous announcements by scientists that they have detected entire planetary system deep in space have set the astronomical community abuzz.

Emily Lakdawalla

Following up on the story I first posted on August 22, the Jupiter impact fireball first noticed by Japanese amateur astronomer Masayuki Tachikawa has been independently confirmed by two other Japanese astronomers.

Emily Lakdawalla

This may be a very common event after all: another optical flash has been observed on Jupiter, again from an observer far east of the Greenwich meridian, though it was not Anthony Wesley (for once).

Emily Lakdawalla

Congratulations to Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo for identifying the first known L5 Trojan asteroid of Neptune!

Emily Lakdawalla

Three months ago, grandiosely, I announced that I was going to survey volcanism across the solar system, and I began the journey on Earth. Then I failed to follow up.

Emily Lakdawalla

Speaking of spacecraft crashing...

Emily Lakdawalla

What does a barred spiral galaxy look like? THIS is what a barred spiral galaxy looks like.

Emily Lakdawalla

Via Daniel Fischer's Tweet about a blog entry by Astro BobI learned of something which should be obvious to anyone who has trained even a rather small telescope on Jupiter over the past few weeks: one of its iconic stripes is just plain gone.

Emily Lakdawalla

That's a bit of an overdramatic title, but it's true that the most efficient way for us to reduce the risk we face from asteroids that have a very small chance of hitting Earth in the future is to determine their orbits more precisely.

Emily Lakdawalla

Every time I post a radio telescope image of a near-Earth asteroid, I get at least one reader question asking me to explain how radio telescopes take photos, so I'm hereby writing a post explaining the basics of how delay-Doppler imaging works.

Emily Lakdawalla

Radio scientist Lance Benner posted to the Minor Planets Mailing list this evening the following message:

Emily Lakdawalla

There are two cool stories circulating today on the theme of discovering new places in the cosmos.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Palomar Observatory adaptive optics image of the crater Cabeus remains the best I've seen from ground-based telescopes of the LCROSS impact site.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's the sharpest optical image shown today of the Moon, from Palomar Observatory.

Emily Lakdawalla

I am pretty sure this image shows the LCROSS impact plume and its shadow as seen from the MMT observatory in Arizona, but as Alan Boyle just pointed out, the time stamps indicate the photos were all taken before the nominal impact time.

Emily Lakdawalla

From the

Timothy Reed

Timothy Reed explains how optical telescopes are tested for gravity sag, and the methods used to counteract or compensate for it.

John Spencer

Taking a look at Jupiter's moon, Io, from Hawaii.

Ken Kremer

Farewell to Hubble, Obama Calls, Astronauts Testify to Congress as Shuttle is Set to Land

Mark Adler

On Monday, if all goes well, we will launch the Space Shuttle to rejuvenate one the greatest scientific missions launched on or off the Earth: the Hubble Space Telescope.