Hasta La Gadget!

Astronomy just lost one of its vanguards, as Sir Bernard Lovell has died at 98. The UK-born scientist was best known as a cornerstone of radio telescope development. While he wasn’t the first to leap into the field, he established the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Observatory to study cosmic rays in 1945 and organized the construction of what would ultimately be called the Lovell Telescope — a radio telescope so large and useful that it’s still the third-largest steerable example in the world, 55 years after it was first put into action. His work helped track some of the earliest spacecraft and was instrumental in confirming the first discovered pulsars and quasars. On top of his most conspicuous achievements, Sir Lovell played an important role in developing airborne radar during World War II and was lauded for having scientific curiosity long after he hung up his Jodrell director’s hat in 1980. Science will be poorer without him.

[Image credit: NASA; thanks, Darren]

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Radio astronomy pioneer Sir Bernard Lovell dies at 98 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Aug 2012 14:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Like NASA says, these stars look like the thousand bright flashes of people taking photos just before a big rock concert. In reality, they are the oldest stars in our very own Milky Way, captured by Hubble. More »

The International Space Station is set to get a new camera that is specifically designed to image the Earth. The camera is called ISERV and it was launched on board the Japanese Aerospace exploration Agencies HTV-3 transfer vehicle. The camera system will be controllable from operators on the ground and will be able to take crystal clear pictures of specific areas on the Earth’s surface.

ISERV stands for International Space Station SERVIR Environmental Research and Visualization System. The camera will be installed in the Window Observational Research Facility inside the station’s Destiny laboratory. The camera portion of ISERV appears to be a standard DSLR and the massive lens is a modified commercial telescope.

Operators on the ground will be able to enter a precise location, and when the ISS passes over, images will be taken and automatically and sent back to the ground operators. The goal is to use the camera to help scientists gain operational experience and expertise to design more capable control systems in the future. The camera will also be used to monitor disasters on Earth.

It’s taken more than six years of development, but a new imaging system for the Palomar Observatory’s 200-inch Hale Telescope finally started capturing images last month, and promises to aid significantly in the search for planets outside our solar system (otherwise known as exoplanets). With the suitably mysterious name of “Project 1640,” the new instrument is the first of its kind that’s able to directly spot planets orbiting distant suns — as opposed to existing systems that use indirect detection methods to determine the orbit of exoplanets. To do that, Project 1640 effectively blots out the light from stars, which allows astronomers to more clearly observe what might be around them, including objects up to 10 million times fainter than the star itself (the image on the right above is a nearby star captured with the imaging system in place, compared to the same star captured without the new system on the left). Those curious can find more specifics on just how that’s accomplished in the official announcement linked below.

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Project 1640 offers new way to search for planets beyond our solar system originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Jul 2012 20:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This is U Camelopardalis, a carbon star 1,500 light years away from Earth, in the constellation of the same name, near the North Celestial Pole. U Cam—as it is known—is at the end of its life, erupting layers of material from time to time: More »