I briefly blogged yesterday about the massive image of our own galaxy, the milky way, that has been released by the people using the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope.
I just wanted to reiterate that it is really worth taking a look, and there is a great site produced by the team that not only uses the Google Maps interface (.astronomy!) but also highlights some features like nebulae to help the uninitiated viewer.
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:
This KMZ file splits down into several separate files so you can chose to select or deselect any and all of the above objects. Clicking on the satellite or telescope’s icon brings up information about that object with links to more information. Screenshots below for those who like that sort of thing.
To see more Google Earth satellite files check out the general Satellites on Google Earth post and the Chinese Space Debris post. As always, suggestions are welcomed in the comments section. For example, I had created a time-slider dependent satellite tracker but it just ended up being really annoying. Would that be something people would want? Also, as mentioned in a previous comment, I am in the process of creating a tracker that uses a Sketchup model instead of an icon. All thoughts welcome, have fun playing with these.
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 be lots of fun and will with any luck also be when I graduate my PhD. The video is below, or via this link for other formats.
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 fun.
ESA currently defines its goals beyond 2025 in four general areas:
Firstly they would like to build a far-infrared interferometer. This is something that they cannot currently do technologically and so are hoping that advances in the next deacde or so may allow them to do it beyond then. This will enable them to study both the distant universe and nearby star-forming regions in amazing detail.
The second point of future study is the B-mode polarization of the CMB. This is a big question, but again ESA are hoping that technology will catch up with their blue skies (or is it black skies?) thinking
Ultra-high energy cosmic rays are the third target. Knowing where the most energetic particles in the universe originate and how they interact with the rest of the universe is vital to fully understanding many of the most fascinating areas of astronomy.
Finally, and most excitingly, ESA wants to build Darwin, the terrestrial planet finder. Darwin has been speculated about for some time. Darwin will use three space telescopes, each at least 3 metres in diameter, and a fourth to serve as a communications hub. The telescopes will operate together to scan the nearby Universe, looking for signs of life on Earth-like planets.
If it works, ESA plan to take spectra which will identify the composition of the atmosphere of exoplanets. They also think they will be able to determine if a planet has oceans and continents from the data that Darwin will produce.
The best-case scenario is that technology will have advanced enough for Darwin to actually make images of the surfaces of other Earth-like planets in the galaxy. Many people now see this, as the goal of space exploration over the next century.
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:
In order to try to answer these questions, ESA takes submissions for proposed missions and then gives these to a series of committees and panels, who then advise and give their thoughts. Space missions are extremely costly and take a very long time to fully execute. Hubble has been running for 17 years now, but was conceived of even before I was born, making it older than me in a strange sort of way.
They began calls for Cosmic Vision in 2004 and received 50 proposals for missions. They have decided that there will be one large and one medium sized mission launched in 2018 and 2017 respectively.
Considerations are now underway as to which of several viable options should been followed through. The medium sized mission has been alloted around €300 million and the large has €650 million (you’ll note later that many proposed missions cost more but collaborations can solve that). Assessment will continue now until 2009, when after a few of the options are discarded, further assessment goes until 2011. Given the time spent assessing these things, you’d think ESA could just save enough money for a whole new mission if they cut out the decision makers!
So on to the good stuff: what missions will they chose? The possibilities are listed below, and there are some really cool options. Though, oddly, I prefer the medium-sized options in general. I have included links where available. If you know where I can find any missing ones, please let me know and I’ll add them in.
Medium-Sized Possible Future Missions:
Plato - A planetary transits and astroseismology mission. Would produce high-accuracy photometry of a large sample of bright stars. It would be able to determine the ages of planetary systems and create a evolutionary sequence of how planets form. [Link]
SPACE/DUNE - This would be an either/or situation between two missions that would try to find evidence of dark energy. DUNE would use a wide-field infrared camera to detect gravitational lensing of galaxies caused by intervening dark material. Thus it would be able to verify the existence of such material and tell us where it is. SPACE would perform near-infrared spectroscopy of 500 million galaxies to try and measure the baryonic acoustic imprint of dark energy in the universe. (Way over my head). [DUNE PDF Link] [SPACE Link]
Marco Polo - This mission would travel to a near Earth object (NEO) and return a sample of material to the Earth itself. A bit like the recent missions to an asteroid and a comet that have tried to do the same.
Cross-Scale - Magnetoshperic physics mission involving multiple craft to study plasma in the Earth-Sun system. The idea is to launch a feasibility study first to see whether such a program of exploration would be beneficial.
Large-Sized Possible Future Missions:
Xeus - A large-collecting-area x-ray observatory. Not a singular mission, but an observatory in space like Hubble or JWST. This is essentially a follow up to ESA’s very successful XMM-Newton mission. Could probe large-scale structure in the universe and the growth of supermassive black holes and galaxies. (Approximate cost €1.2 billion) [Link]
LaPlace - Missions to the Outer planets. LaPlace would visit the Jupiter system and would consist of more than one orbiting probe. It would investigate the magnetosphere of Jupiter as well as how the system may have formed. In a best-case scenario there would also be a Europa lander to assess the feasibility of life of the moon. (Joint mission with NASA/JAXA)
TANDEM - The Titan AND Enceladus Mission would head to Saturn to explore the origins and nature of these two moons. (Joint mission with NASA/JAXA) [Link]
LISA - The much hyped gravitational waves mission. always cited as being a few year around the corner, this larg-scale mission didn’t even need to apply with a new proposal. LISA is a giant interferometer in space, composed of three craft, which should hopefully be able to detect the stretching and squeezing of the fabric of spacetime caused by the motions of extremely massive objects. (Approximate cost €1 billion) [Link]
In the final post in this series, I will be talking about ESA’s plans beyond 2025 and the technology they hope to be able to exploit.
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 currently running or up-and-coming.
So where is ESA right now? Currently ESA is supporting or in some way dealing with about a dozen missions in operation. Between now and 2015, ESA has 8 more spacecraft due to launch. In this post I will briefly overview those upcoming launches. In my next post, I shall discuss the future beyond 2015.
This year will see three payloads put into orbit: Chandryaan, Herschel and Planck. Chandrayaan is an unmanned lunar mission in association with the Indian Space Agency. Herschel and Planck are ESA endeavours and Herschel particularly is seen as a flagship mission. Herschel will be a big step forward technologically and will usher in a lot of Far Infrared data for people like me in the area of star formation, and indeed for anyone else who likes to look at fairly cold, dusty things.
2010 will see something called Microscope go up. This is an experiment to test Einstein’s equivalence principle, which is a key postulate in the characterization of space-time and the theory of gravitation. 2010 also sees the LISA Pathfinder mission launch, which will test the viability of LISA, a much talked about gravity wave experiment which always seems to be 5 years away.
In 2011, GAIA, another flagship mission will be sent up to measure the precise distances and velocities of a billion stars. It will track the motions of stars down to 10-20 microarcseconds and a magnitude down to 15. This mission will revolutionise the way we model our galaxy, as we will begin to see how the stars that make it up are moving about.
In 2013, the James Webb Space Telescope will launch, which is seen by many as the successor to Hubble although it will really be looking at non-visible wavelengths. Also in 2013 is the wonderfully named BepiColombo, a Mercury mission which will also test the theory of relativity.
Finally in 2015, ESA will launch the Solar Orbiter which will produce images of the Sun at an unprecedented resolution and perform closest ever in-situ measurements.
You can find out more about any of these mission at ESA’s website.
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 have to do is synchronise our watches.
Let’s say I have a telescope with a computer attached to it. This telescope always knows exactly where it is pointing in the sky and exactly what time it is. Finally this telescope knows where it is on the Earth in terms of latitude and longitude. Now let’s connect this telescope to the internet and constantly feed the images it produces to a server.
To anyone working in astronomy, this is already true for professional telescopes. In fact Stuart over at Astronomy Blog created his telescope RSS feeds using just this data not too long ago.
Now finally let us do something that isn’t normally the case: let’s connect every telescope to just one server. This central server can use the data to construct an image of any object in all four dimensions using the positions both on the sky and on the Earth from each scope. All you have to do is have enough telescopes looking at the same things.
In the case of Comet Holmes there were a great many telescopes pointed at the object as it flew by, creating a lovely glowing ball that later faded away. The various stages of its evolution were imaged and these images could all be compiled into a kind of virtual space. You ought to be able to fly around inside a computer generated model which is constructed from the images. The projections of those images into virtual space just come from the telescopes own properties and position.
I am trying this technique with another, less exciting dataset. If it works then I may try it with some images from telescopes. However this data is sparse and spread out over the world. I do not have enough of it myself to make a good start. Maybe next time a big event is occuring we, the internet (if there is such a thing) could get organised and try to create a 4D record of an event? Astronomy has eyes everywhere and if these eyes can work together, via Google Earth, AstroGrid or other more novel collaborations, then 21st Century astronomy will be a turning point, and we can all be a part of it.
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 go to anyone who was relying on Gemini data for their PhD
[from Astronomy Blog]
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. They will be using a 10 square degree field of view camera with a 3.2 gigapixel resolution. Using this device the telescope will output 30 terabytes of data per night! That makes 150 petabytes over the course of one month (source: Astronomy Blog). A petabyte, in case you don’t know is 1024 TB, which in turn are 1024 GB.
Bill Gates is also backing the project with some of his own money, as well as a series of other investors who clearly have been sparked by the ambition and grandeur of this endeavour.
By imaging and then reimaging at such a short interval, this telescope will mean that you can make stop-motion movies of events as they occur in the universe. Supernovae, comet tails, binary stars and anything else with a day-or-longer timescale could be captured as a series of time frames.
The aim is to make all the data publicly accessible by 2013, which will mean a huge step forward in the distribution and availability of images of the universe in which we live.
Stuart (Astronomy Blog) has been busy working on the telescope XML that has been discussed before. Well he has actually posted some working feeds in what he called STML (see post title).
In response I’ve tried to create Google Sky equivalent KML files. These just read in the STML feeds and put a little icon onto Google Sky with a bit of information from the feeds.
Download the Telescope STML Feeds Google Sky Tracker here
It’s a work in progress and I hope that Stuart will keep expanding the idea. I think it has lots of potential. In fact I’m doing a talk about it tomorrow.
Stuart over at Astronomy Blog is trying to organise the creation of an XML structure for astronomical observations. He proposed the idea a short while ago but has recently posted anew with regard to getting some help in creating an XML schema for this new kind of feed. This sort of thing could one day be linked into, say, Google Earth, to allow people to follow where the telescopes of the world are pointing.
The implications are possibly very important. Future, large-scale astronomical events could be easily organised via such feeds to allow fuller coverage and better public communication.
So if you have any knowledge or input, Stuart would like to hear it. Read more on Astronomy Blog.
Incidentally I recently found a link for Google Earth that allows you to follow planes (on a 30 minutes delay) in real-time through the air. This is very cool and shows what can be accomplished with standardised data schemas. Click for the openATC website.
IRAM 30m Sierra Nevada
Originally uploaded by juanjaen.
This is an Infra Red telescope with a 30m dish found in Sierra Nevada, Spain. I have used data from this scope in my own research and hadn’t realised quite how cool it looked in reality.
So my name is now on a (soon-to-be) published paper. How and why this happened is a little over my head, but I shall try to explain. One thing you should know however, is that I haven’t really done anything so far to help get this paper out. I haven’t written anything for it. I have never attended a meeting about it or even met most of the people I have co-authored it with. So how am I now a published scientist?
You’ll find ‘my’ first paper here on the astro-ph preprint server (Link), and you can download a PDF version here (Link). It is 60 pages, but about 20 are references and figures. It is titled ‘The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope Legacy Survey of Nearby Star-Formiung Regions in the Gould Belt’.
Science is often done in groups these days. It takes a lot of combined effort and time to get the kudos and the know-how that gets money and recognition. This isn’t always the case but it is more true now than it was a decade ago.
The other day, on the blog, I was talking about how science could be more open. This is one area where, as Stuart pointed out in the comments, astronomy is very much open already. Of the 62 authors on the paper, I would imagine only a few have had a strong, guiding hand in the paper’s creation. A good bulk of them, lets say 80%, will have been involved at least in some significant way. The remaining handful - like myself - will have none nothing or a least very little. Those numbers are guesses since I’m new at this.
In this way, trams of scientists benefit from distributed expertise - each individual contributing their own unique talents and knowledge.
I am however signed up to help execute this survey. I am scheduled to man the telescope if needed for observations of the following areas Serpens, Cepheus, Pipe Nebula, CrA. I signed for it much like you would register for a website or something. A most unusual experience I felt.
The purpose of the survey as the title suggests is to look at the Gould Belt, which is an area in the sky that forms a ring around our position, roughly. It is shown in the image above along with some of the survey’s target areas. This ring, or belt, is home to many of the most active star forming regions in our neighbourhood and some of the brightest O-type stars in the sky as well. It is about 350pc in radius.
It was first seen by John Herschel, observing from the Southern Hemisphere in 1847 and later completed into a ring by a guy named Gould in 1879, hence the name.
By mapping the whole region we will achieve an impressive and broad catalogue of protostars and prestellar sources which will enable us to determine some key information about these young objects as they become stars.
So why am I on the paper? Well the whole team gets credit for each paper in the survey. If and when I go observing and reduce data on the Gould Belt, I will have the help and expertise, as well as the background papers published, by a team of incredible experts. We collaborate to achieve good science by sharing both the workload and the results.
So I’m chuffed with this incredibly low-effort publication and hope to actually have some involvement and maybe a paper ‘of my own’ in the next couple of years.
This is a lovely long-exposure photo where the telescope dome has been rotated to allow the shot to appear to show the whole scope. The 0.8m telescope is the Haute-Provence Observatory built in 1937 near the current site of St.Michel l’Observatoire. I once went to see this place with my wife and her parents but it was closed on Wednesdays. I love france for its laid back approach but I do wish they could sort out their opening hours.
Wired are reporting on a feasability study from the NASA Institute for Advanced Studies on a giant liquid mirror telescope that could potentially be placed on the Moon. Roger Angel or the University of Arizona is the man in charge of this study and he is suggestying it may be possible to build a 100m diameter telescope on the Moon that would be able to collect 1,736 times mnore light than Hubble.
There is currently a 6m liquid telescope under construction in British Columbia, Canada (they already have a working 2.7m model, shown above) but if moved to the Moon a far larger structure could be built and then mantained more easily. With the Moon’s much weaker gravity buildings could be far larger without stressing under their own weight and they would be easier to move around, targeting the sky.
Liquid Mirror Telescopes (LMTs) cost 10 to 20 times less to manufacute than a polished aluminium mirror equivalent and in fact building a 20m LMT for the Moon would cost less than the $4.7 billion dollars NASA is spending on the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s succesor in the sky.
It seems that the ide ais sound enough and it is really just details left to debate. The greatest technical challenge is finding reflective liquids with low freezing points and vapor pressures (i.e. they would freeze or evaporate when placed on the Moon).
Ermanno Borra, of Laval University in Quebec, was the first made the case for an LMT on the Moon back in 1991. Recently, Borra has been experimenting with metal liquid-like films, that reflect light as effectively as aluminum. According to the Wired article, Borra declined to comment on his results until they’ve been published in Nature later this summer.
NASA’s Chandra observatory, in unison with ground-based optical telescopes, has relased details of a supernova from last September which is the brightest ever recorded. SN 2006gy exploded in galaxy NGC 1260 and was the brightest such event ever seen. NGC 1260 is 240 million light years away and the supernoa appeared to outshine the entries galaxy in both optical and x-ray wavelengths.
This event is believed to be a Type II supernova, which occur at the end of a large stars life. When a star is larger than about nine solar masses it will go through a different set of fusion reactions at the end if its life. As the hydrogen runs out, having all been converted to other elements, the stars begins to grow unstable at its centre as the heavier elements grow more and more dense and the gravitational pressure becomes unsustainable by the star’s newlty formed iron core. When the core reaches a mass known as the Chandrasekhar limit, a catastrophic collapse ensues during which the stars outer layers fall inward at a speed nearly one quarter that of light.
In just a few seconds 1040 joules (one hundred billion trillion trillion trillion) of gravitational energy are crushing down on the core which becomes as desne as an atomic nuceus and so the collapse bounces. Bounce is a very gentle word for what happens but since the core has taken all the pressue it possible can, the falling material has no choice but to rebound and it blows outward, destroying the star with it and showering the universe in neutrinos and everything else.
In the above image, taken from NASA’s press release, the top section shows an artists impression of the event close-up. The lower left panel is an infrared image and the lower-right an x-ray image from Chandra. both the lower panels show the nucelus of NGC 1260 on the left and SN 2006gy on the right.
SN 2006gy is thought to be the largest such event witnessed and even more interestingly, it bore a striking resemblance to a star in our own galaxy just before it died. Eta Carinae was the star which appeared in Hubble’s 17th Anniversary image. SN 2006gy is thought to have beren a lot like ETa Carinae; both were enormous stars which had begun spewing out material. If Eta Carinae follows the same path as SN 2006gy then we could be in for more than just a bright light in Chandra’s field of view. Whereas SN 2006gy is 240 million light years away, Eta Carinae is only 7,500. If it did go supernova then it would be visible during the day and at night would cast shadows almost as well as the full moon.
Hopefully more information and more images will follow and with any luck Eta Carinae will give us a repeat, close-up discussion someday in the future. If it did then it would be the most fantastic event in all of modern civilisation.
I was listening to the May edition of the Jodcast earlier and they were talking to one Carole Mundell who works at the Liverpool Telescope with Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs).
GRBs are highly energetic, and extremely short-lived flashed of gamma rays that are seen all over the sky. They were first detected by US Military satellites as their signatures looked like nuclear tests. Obviously though, as opposed to a nuclear test, these GRBs happened in the wrong direction (skyward not groundward). Astronomers later became interested when the US Army published its data and since then these events have become the object of study.
GRBs are the most luminous events in the whole universe (so far as we know). They may well be the product of colliding neutron stars or the emmission from jets shooting out of Wolf-Rayet stars as they collapse into black holes created inside of themselves (depicted in image). Whatever they are they are interesting and the astronomy community is out to find them.
The trouble is that they are very short lived. They can last for just milliseconds or at the most a few minutes. This lead scientists and researchers to have to use the height of technology to spot them. NASA’s Swift satellite is just such an example of the kind of thing that could not have been done even a few years ago. Swift was launched in 2004 and watched the sky for the unique signature of a GRB. As soon as it finds one, messages are relayed to the ground within a few seconds and within just two or three minutes (with any luck) a robotic telescope on the Earth (such as the Liverpool Robotic telescope) is turning to look at the source. Whilst Swift can measure the GRB’s spectrum we need to observe these events in other wavelengths to really begin to understand them.
At the same time as the telescopes begin to move around a text message is sent to a whole host of astronomers around the world, alerting them that a burst has occurred. That way if they want they can log in, over the internet, to the telescope system and watch too. I thought that was pretty cool.
You can download the May 2007 edition of The Jodcast right here.
I know this is literally yesterday’s news but here is my take on the story anyway. Researchers using the ESO 3.6m telescope in Chile have analysed the wobble of a star known as Gliese 581 (centre of starfield below). This star is about 20 light years away. Previously, a Neptune-like planet was found around this star by people using the HARPS data.
Now the new research shows that there three planets, currently designated Gliese 581b, c and d (a is the star). The c planet is the Earth-like object. With a mass five time that of Earth and a diameter about 1.5 times. Using the fun AstroGrav software, which models masses such as solar systems as they interact via gravity, I made a mock up of the Gliese 581 system to help better visualise it using th data given in the paper.
Yes, it is exciting that as our method improve we can find smaller and more Earth-like planets. However there is nothing to indicate that this planet looks anything like the Earth.Now don’t get me wrong, I am excited by this discovery. The indication, as I just said, that we might be able to pick out such tiny planets in the galaxy and relatively nearby is very exciting. This world has very strong gravity and a neighbour planet that flies through its sky every few days, possibly causing subtle eclipses and displaying rapidly changing phases like our Moon. Such an exotic world inspires the imagination and i hope that as we discover ever-more Earthy worlds we can see how our way of existing is just one of millions of possibilities in our galaxy alone.
So to conclude I shall change my tone. Yesterday we had news of the most Earth-like planet yet discovered. The cool thing though, is that we haven’t even begun our search for these terrestrial worlds really. The telescopes and techniques that are coming into use in the nest few years will completely bow away this amazing find. In about twenty or so year we might be lucky enough to even see a picture of one of these worlds. Maybe it will have continents and oceans like our own, maybe it will be more exotic than we had ever dreamed.
Maybe someone will be looking back.
So Hubble is now 17 years old and so NASA/ESA have released some incredible pictures take with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) of the Carina Nebula. This nebula contains one of the largest known stars Eta Carinae, which is a highly unpredictable variable with a brightness greater than 4 million suns! It can be see in the far left of this image.
The Carina Nebula is situated an estimated 7 500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina, that lies at the keel of the ship Argo Navis. This fifty light-year-wide view gives us a peek into star formation as it commonly occurs along the dense spiral arms of a galaxy.
Also released was another close up image of a part of the same region showing intricate details of star forming regions, including a massive bipolar jet of heated material. These are just the kind of incredible images that Hubble has always given us, and if SM4 goes ahead as intended Hubble will continue to amaze us as it moves into its third decade.
You can find more pictures and information over on the ESA press release page.
These days we’ve all seen pictures of other worlds in stunning detail. We are familiar with pictures of the Moon and of the Earth and well know that the circles we see online and on paper are really globes, floating around in outer space. Now NASA’s STEREO mission to observe the Sun as it interacts with the Earth is giving us our first 3D images of real events. Anyone can knock up a computer generated model of the Sun or anything else but these are real images taken of the star we see in our skies everyday (well that’s an exaggeration, I suppose).
You’ll need to dig out a pair of standard 3D glasses to see the current slew of pictures and videos but they are well worth it. You can watch solar flares in 3D and see the Sun rotate. At present the videos are sadly not very high resolution, but the images are and look quite stunning, click on the ones below for larger versions. I hope that someone can reprocess these in different ways to enhance the 3D component as i’m sure there are clever things to be done.
The STEREO mission is made up of two identical spacecraft called STEREO-A and -B. The A (for After) craft trails behind the Earth in its orbit around the Sun, whilst the B(efore) craft goes ahead of us. The twin craft are loaded with scientific instruments for measuring the material ejected from the Sun and how it interacts with the Earth. This is the same material that causes the aurora here on Earth and which can damaged power grids and satellites or even kill astronauts.
As time goes by the two craft will move about, changing their angle of viewing of the Sun and Earth. This will enable better creation of 3D images amongst other things, but more importantly will give researchers a fuller view of the relationship between the Sun and Earth, which is now a very large field in astrophysics, as was demonstrated by the huge number and variety if talks on the subject at NAM.
STEREO has only just begun to take real observations in the past couple of weeks and new and exciting data and images are sure to start pouring onto the internet and into journals.
At NAM I heard a great talk by Gary Fuller on Methanol Masers (a sort of laser created by gas in space). Whilst I find the topic quite interesting its a bit beyond this blog for now. However the telescope used as part of his research is the Parkes 64m telescope in Australia, shown above.
This is the telescope that helped relay the images of the Moon landings in 1969. NASA was quite unsure about the Australian approach to the mission and the events surrounding the days and week preceeding the historic mission are detailed in the 2000 movie ‘The Dish‘.
The giant 64m radio dish sits on top of the control room and moves about to view different parts of the sky both day and night (since it is a radio dish and sunlight is unimportant). I went to the Parkes Observatory website and found lots of useful material including this cool movie of a day in the life of the telescope.
