Looking Up by Bob Eklund
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
ECLIPSE OF THE SUN THIS SUNDAY, MAY 20th – People with clear skies across most of North America will experience a partial eclipse of the Sun late this Sunday afternoon (May 20, 2012). Only those near the Eastern Seaboard will miss out on this awesome cosmic event. If you happen to be in a swath of land running from Northern California to Texas, you’ll get a very special kind of partial [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
VISTA VIEWS A VAST BALL OF STARS – A new image of Messier 55 from the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA infrared survey telescope shows tens of thousands of stars crowded together like a swarm of bees. Besides being packed into a relatively small space, these stars are also among the oldest in the universe. Astronomers study Messier 55 and other ancient objects like it, called globular [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
HUBBLE SEES “SEARCHLIGHT BEAMS” COMING FROM NEBULA: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has been at the cutting edge of research into what happens to stars like our Sun at the ends of their lives. One stage that stars pass through as they run out of nuclear fuel is called the preplanetary (or protoplanetary) nebula stage. A new Hubble image of the “Egg Nebula” shows one of the best views [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
ANTARCTIC ASTRONOMY – A team of scientists representing several international institutions, including Texas A&M University, has succeeded in installing the first of three Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3-1) at the Chinese Kunlun Station at Dome Argus, the highest point of the Antarctic Plateau. The telescope is the first of three half-meter devices to be installed at PLATeau Observatory [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
The British musical group “Zinta & The Zoots” recently gave a most unusual concert at Canterbury College, England. Joining the band for the live performance was an enigmatic musical contributor, whose part was originated some 11,000 years earlier—the supernova remnant Cassiopeia “A.” Thanks to radio astronomer Jan van Muijlwijk and his team of astronomers and amateur radio buffs, [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
WHAT WOULD YOUR VOICE SOUND LIKE ON MARS AND VENUS? Despite many years of space exploration, we have no evidence of what things would sound like on other planets. While most planetary probes have focused on imaging with cameras and radar and a couple have carried microphones, none of them successfully listened to the sounds of another world. Now, a team from the University of Southampton (UK), [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
FORMATION FLYING, AROUND THE MOON AT 3,600 MPH – The act of two or more aircraft flying together in a disciplined, synchronized manner is one of the cornerstones of military aviation, as well as just about any organized air show. But as amazing as the U.S. Navy’s elite Blue Angels or the U.S. Air Force’s Thunderbirds are to behold, they remain essentially landlocked, anchored if you will, [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
Earth usually has more than one natural moon, according to a team of astronomers from the University of Helsinki, the Paris Observatory and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Our 2,000-mile-diameter Moon, so beloved by poets, artists and romantics, has been orbiting Earth for over 4 billion years. Its much smaller cousins, dubbed “minimoons,” are thought to be only a few feet across and to [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
VENUS AND JUPITER DANCE AT DUSK – For the past month the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter, have been an eye-catching duo in the western sky after sunset. Week by week they’ve been gradually sliding closer together, and their celestial performance has just culminated. By March 9th these dazzling evening “stars” were less than 5 degrees apart, about the width of three fingers at [...]
Looking Up – Bob Eklund
By observing the Moon using the Very Large Telescope at European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile, astronomers have found evidence of life in the universe—on Earth! Finding life on our home planet may sound like a trivial observation, but the novel approach of an international team may lead to future discoveries of life elsewhere in the universe. The work is described in a paper in the [...]
