Lunar Prospects
Launched on January 6th, NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft has been exploring the Moon with instruments designed to sense global properties while orbiting pole-to-pole, 63 miles above the lunar surface. Now over half way through its primary ...
Radio, The Big Ear, And The Wow! Signal
Since the early days of radio and television we have been freely broadcasting signals into space. For some time now, we have been listening too. Ohio State University's radio telescope, affectionately known as "The Big Ear" , was one of the first ...
Jupiters Rings Revealed
Why does Jupiter have rings? Jupiter's rings were discovered in 1979 by the passing Voyager 1 spacecraft, but their origin has always been a mystery. Recent data from the Galileo spacecraft currently orbiting Jupiter now confirms that these ...
The NTT SUSI Deep Field
What happens if you point a large telescope at nothing? The above New Technology Telescope SUSI Deep Field photograph isolated a small patch of sky picked to contain no bright objects at all. A very long exposure was then taken, similar to the ...
Dust Hip-Deep on Phobos
Landing on the Martian Moon Phobos might be harder than previously thought. The reason: Moon dust. Recent photographs of Phobos have indicated that a layer of fine powder estimated to be a meter deep covers the whole surface. Evidence comes ...
Star Trails in Northern Skies
As the Earth spins on its axis, the sky seems to rotate around us. This motion produces the beautiful concentric trails traced by the stars in this time exposure of the night sky. In the middle of the picture is the North Celestial Pole (NCP), ...
Help Map The Moon
You can help map the Moon. Early tomorrow morning (Saturday, September 12) the Moon will occult, or pass in front of, the bright star Aldebaran as viewed from some Southern and Eastern areas of the U.S. as well as regions in the Caribbean Sea, ...
Europa: Ridges and Rafts on a Frozen...
The large Jovian moon Europa may harbor liquid water beneath its frozen crust. Controversy surrounding this idea has been recently fueled by dramatic images of Europa's surface from the Galileo spacecraft. This alluring color image was produced ...
Crater Copernicus
One of the more prominent craters on the Moon is named Copernicus. Copernicus is a large young crater visible with binoculars slightly northwest of the center of the Moon's Earth-facing hemisphere. Copernicus is distinguished by its size and by ...
A Cluster Too Far
Why is this galaxy cluster so red? Nearby clusters have galaxies with colors that are much more yellow and blue. A leading explanation is that this cluster of galaxies lies so far across our universe (z~1) that cosmological time dilation ...
