Tag Archives: Telescopes

Spitzer’s Galaxy

Spitzer’s Galaxy

A fantastic image from the Spitzer Space Telescope (which you’ll see all over the web today) of our own Milky Way galaxy. The team have release a Google Maps API type site that lets you browse the galaxy in the infrared with some guidance.

Space Telescopes on Google Earth

Space Telescopes on Google Earth

Continuing my series of posts regarding Google Sky and Google Earth, here is a KMZ file that will let you find some of the prominent and interesting space telescopes and satellites on Google Earth. This file includes real-time position tracking and 1 hour flight paths for 9 different space telescopes and satellites.

IYA 2009 Trailer

IYA 2009 Trailer

Trailers seem to be the ‘in thing’ these days. There is a (very long) trailer for the BLAST experiment’s movie somewhere out on the internet. Today, this very nice trailer popped up in my Twitter feed from Stuart at Astronomy Blog. It’s for the International Year of Astronomy, also known as 2009. This is going [...]

ESA’s Cosmic Vision: Part 3

ESA’s Cosmic Vision: Part 3

My two previous posts have covered what ESA is currently working on and and what ESA may be doing in the decade 2015-2025. So what happens next? Well it may seem crazy to speculate on what we will be sending into space almost twenty years from now, but these things taken some planning. It’s also [...]

ESA’s Cosmic Vision: Part 2

ESA’s Cosmic Vision: Part 2

In a previous post I gave a quick run down of where ESA currently stands with regard to missions into space. Now for the lowdown on where they intend to be after 2015. Cosmic Vision is ESA’s plan for the decade 2015-2025.
The aims of Cosmic Vision are divided into four sections:

What are the conditions for [...]

ESA’s Cosmic Vision: Part 1

ESA’s Cosmic Vision: Part 1

We had a talk yesterday from Dr. Fabio Favata titled “Space Astronomy in ESA’s Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 plan”. Cosmic Vision is the European Space Agency’s peculiar name for its plan over the next decade and a bit. The talk was very good, and covered almost the whole breadth of ESA’s big activities that are either [...]

Omnipresent Astronomy

Omnipresent Astronomy

The recent pass of Comet Holmes and today’s close approach of Asteroid 2007 TU24 (shown below, image from space.com) have gotten me thinking again about open source astronomy. I have always been fascinated by the internet and how modern networking technologies bring things into one big mesh, and astronomy fits right into this. All we [...]

Gemini: Cancelled

Stuart over at Astronomy Blog is breaking the bad news that the UK is now going to have to completely pull out of Gemini. All future UK observations are cancelled. These are not good times for UK astronomy.
The UK will no longer have access to the largest professional telescopes in the northern hemisphere. My sympathies [...]

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope: One of the Coolest Things Ever

There are big ideas and then there are big ideas. The Large Synoptic Survey telescope is a massive idea. The proposal is to build a telescope in Chile that will survey the entire sky in just a matter of days, at high resolution.
The team have drafted in Google to assist with their massive data operation. [...]

Copyright © 2010 Robert J. Simpson. Twitter @orbitingfrog