Latest Telescopes Stories
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has passed its most significant mission milestone to date, the Mission Critical Design Review, or MCDR. This signifies the integrated observatory will meet all science and engineering requirements for its mission."I'm delighted by this news and proud of the Webb program's great technical achievements," said Eric Smith, Webb telescope program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The independent team conducting the review confirmed the...
WASHINGTON, April 28 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has passed its most significant mission milestone to date, the Mission Critical Design Review, or MCDR. This signifies the integrated observatory will meet all science and engineering requirements for its mission. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "I'm delighted by this news and proud of the Webb program's great technical achievements," said Eric Smith, Webb telescope program...
Last September a team of researchers assembled in southern France. Their six month assignment: develop a new type of space mission, targeting a mysterious segment of the Sun normally hidden in plain sight.Today the results of their race against the clock have been unveiled.The Laboratoire Astrophysique d'Marseille (LAM) served as host to ESA's latest StarTiger project, with the team building a scale-model prototype in a LAM cleanroom. The project's formal closedown took place today at ESA's...
The European Southern Observatory said on Monday that the world's largest telescope will be built in Chile's northern desert for over $1 billion and will set its sights on discovering other worlds like our own. The European Extremely Large Telescope will examine the skies for exoplanets, as well as try and unravel the mystery of dark matter and dark energy. The 137-foot telescope will be built 10,040 feet above sea level on a mountain in Chile's northern, mine rich Atacama desert. This...
Making the invisible visibleThe Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) partners in Germany, the U.S.A. and Italy are pleased to announce that the first of two new innovative near-infrared cameras/spectrographs for the LBT is now available to astronomers for scientific observations at the telescope on Mt. Graham in south-eastern Arizona. After more than a decade of design, manufacturing and testing, the new instrument, dubbed LUCIFER 1, provides a powerful tool to gain spectacular insights into the...
A NASA Boeing 747 carrying a German-made infrared telescope is ready to scan the skies for the first time. Project officials in a NASA hangar in Southern California's high desert showed off the 40,000-pound telescope on Tuesday. The telescope assembly is mounted in the rear of the former Pan Am jetliner. A huge hatch opens during flight to allow the 98-inch-diameter telescope to view the sky. The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is expected to capture its first...
The Cat's Paw Nebula, NGC 6334, is a huge stellar nursery, the birthplace of hundreds of massive stars. In a magnificent new ESO image taken with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, the glowing gas and dust clouds obscuring the view are penetrated by infrared light and some of the Cat's hidden young stars are revealed.Towards the heart of the Milky Way, 5500 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius (the Scorpion),...
Astronomers have snapped a picture of three planets orbiting a star beyond our own using a modest-sized telescope on the ground. The surprising feat was accomplished by a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using a small portion of the Palomar Observatory's Hale Telescope, north of San Diego.The planets had been imaged previously by two of the world's biggest ground-based telescopes -- one of the two 10-meter (33-foot) telescopes of W.M. Keck Observatory and the...
Astronomers from the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics and the Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur in France have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to discover discs of dust around ageing stars. The images will be presented by Foteini (Claire) Lykou on Wednesday April 14th at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2010) in Glasgow."This is the first time we have ever observed in these dusty discs in such detail," said Ms Lykou.Towards the end of its life,...
Using four of the world's largest telescopes, scientists have obtained the most detailed information yet from the regions around two young stars tens of light years away, finding compact discs of rocky and dusty material at distances comparable to that from the Earth to the Sun. Keele University astronomer Dr Rachel Smith will present the team's results on Wednesday April 14th at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2010) in Glasgow.The astronomers used data from the MIDI interferometer,...
Latest Telescopes Reference Libraries
Radio telescopes, used in tracking and collecting data from satellites and space probes, are a form of directional radio antenna used in radio astronomy. They operate on the radio frequency portion of the electromagnetic spectrum where they detect radio sources. Radio telescopes are large parabolic antennas used singly or in an array and are located far from major centers of population in order to avoid electromagnetic interference. Karl Guthe Jansky built the first radio antenna used to...
A telescope, designed to aid the observation of remote objects, collects some form of electromagnetic radiation (such as visible light). The Netherlands developed the first known practical telescope in the 17th century. The term "telescope" was termed in order to describe Galileo's instruments in 1611. However, Galileo was not the inventor of the telescope. It was Hans Lippershey, Zacharias Janssen, and Jacob Metius who are credited with the creation of the telescope. In 1668, Isaac Newton...
The Reverend Thomas William Webb (December 14, 1807 "“ May 19, 1885) was a British astronomer and faithful clergyman. The lone son of a clergyman, the Rev. John Webb was raised and educated by his father in absence of his mother who died in Webb's early childhood. He travelled to Oxford to attend Magdalen College. Soon after, he was ordained a minister by the Anglican Church in 1829. In 1843, he married Henrietta Montague. Mrs. Webb died on September 7, 1884. Webb followed shortly...
Very Large Telescope -- The Very Large Telescope (VLT) consist of four optical telescopes that have 8.4 meter aperture. The VLT is a project of the European Southern Observatory organization. It is located at the Paranal Observatory on Cerro Paranal, a 2,635-m high mountain in the Atacama desert in northern Chile. The VLT consists of a cluster four of large telescopes, and an interferometer (VLTI) which will be used to resolve fine features. The telescopes have been named after the...
Telescope -- A telescope is an instrument composed of one or more lenses or mirrors to gather and focus electromagnetic radiation. Telescopes increase the observed angular size of objects, as well as their apparent brightness. The largest telescopes are used in astronomy. A telescope was first turned on the sky by Galileo Galilei, the Italian scientist. (Telescopes used for non-astronomical purposes may be called "transits," "monoculars," "binoculars," "camera lenses," or "spyglasses".)...
![Protostar G35 Imagery From the SOFIA\](/media/gallery/sofia-stratospheric-observatory-for-infrared-astronomy/thumbs/thumbs_742079main_protostar_g35_fig_1a_1b_150_full_0.jpg "Protostar G35 Imagery From the SOFIA\")
![Protostar G35 Imagery From the SOFIA\](/media/gallery/sofia-stratospheric-observatory-for-infrared-astronomy/thumbs/thumbs_742079main_protostar_g35_fig_1a_1b_150_full.jpg "Protostar G35 Imagery From the SOFIA\")
![NASA\](/media/gallery/sofia-stratospheric-observatory-for-infrared-astronomy/thumbs/thumbs_741421main_ed13-0099-1_full.jpg "NASA\")
