Looking Up by Bob Eklund

Looking Up – Bob Eklund

NASA’s Kepler mission (www.nasa.gov/kepler) has verified 1,284 new planets—the single largest finding of planets to date. “This announcement more than doubles the number of confirmed planets from Kepler,” said Ellen Stofan, chief scientist at NASA …[READ MORE]

Looking Up by Bob Eklund

Looking Up – Bob Eklund

NASA is inviting viewers around the world to see a rare celestial event, with coverage of the transit of the Sun by planet Mercury during the morning of Monday, May 9. Mercury passes directly between …[READ MORE]

Looking Up by Bob Eklund

Looking Up – Bob Eklund

No, it’s not Star Trek yet, but it could be a way to reach the stars within the lifetime of many of us. The initiative is called Breakthrough Starshot—a research and engineering project by Breakthrough …[READ MORE]

Looking Up by Bob Eklund

Looking Up – Bob Eklund

Jupiter’s moon Europa is under a constant gravitational assault. As it orbits, Europa’s icy surface heaves and falls with the pull of Jupiter’s gravity, creating enough heat, scientists think, to support a global ocean under …[READ MORE]

Looking Up by Bob Eklund

Looking Up – Bob Eklund

You can never predict what treasure might be hiding in your own basement. For example, it turns out that a 1917 image on an astronomical glass plate from the Carnegie Observatories’ collection shows the first-ever …[READ MORE]

Looking Up by Bob Eklund

Looking Up – Bob Eklund

Saturday, April 16 is Global Star Party night, when people all over the world will be looking skyward through telescopes—often for the first time in their lives. Several Los Angeles-area star parties are being held …[READ MORE]

Looking Up by Bob Eklund

Looking Up – Bob Eklund

Solar storms are triggering X-ray auroras on Jupiter that are about eight times brighter than normal over a large area of the planet and hundreds of times more energetic than Earth’s “northern lights,” according to …[READ MORE]

Looking Up by Bob Eklund

Looking Up – Bob Eklund

The brilliant flash of an exploding star’s shockwave—what astronomers call the “shock breakout”—has been captured for the first time in the optical wavelength or visible light by NASA’s planet-hunter, the Kepler space telescope. An international …[READ MORE]

Looking Up by Bob Eklund

Looking Up – Bob Eklund

Following a long series of tests, the European Space Agency’s LISA Pathfinder has started its science mission to prove key technologies and techniques needed to observe gravitational waves from space. Predicted by Albert Einstein a …[READ MORE]

Looking Up by Bob Eklund

Looking Up – Bob Eklund

Pluto’s largest moon may have gotten too big for its own skin. Images from NASA’s New Horizons mission suggest that Pluto’s moon Charon once had a subsurface ocean that has long since frozen and expanded, …[READ MORE]