NASA JPL highlights what is in the night sky for this month : What’s Up for October 2013
NASA JPL highlights what is in the night sky for this month : What’s Up for October 2013
This SETI Institute talk combines two amazing developments of our day – the discovery of exoplanets and the development of giant telescopes. Jeff Kuhn of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii gives an excellent presentation (suitable for a wide audience) about The Colossus Project: Designing an optical/IR instrument to detect life outside the solar system:
This talk describes an effort to detect life, and even conduct a planetary census, in our cosmic neighborhood. I’ll describe some results from the Colossus group, an interdisciplinary science and engineering team, working to show how telescopes much larger than the TMT or EELT could be built today by relaxing some of the astronomical requirements of current “world’s largest telescope” projects.
A reader points to this discussion of where the Voyager 1 spacecraft is with respect to our solar system, the heliosphere , the Oort cloud, and interstellar space, a topic on which recent reports may have left some people confused: What’s the deal with Voyager 1? – The Maddow Blog
Has Voyager 1 left the solar system? from The Rachel Maddow Show on Vimeo.
This plot is particularly helpful:
You Are Here, Voyager: This artist’s concept puts huge solar system distances in
perspective. The scale bar is measured in astronomical units (AU), with each set
distance beyond 1 AU representing 10 times the previous distance. Each AU is equal to
the distance from the sun to the Earth. It took from 1977 to 2013 for Voyager 1 to reach
the edge of interstellar space. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Timelapse videos just get better and better. Here is a great one from Jack Fusco in which he shows starscapes moving above “some of New Jersey’s most beautiful beaches and shoreline locations” : Home At The Shore on Vimeo (via I09).
Home At The Shore from Jack Fusco on Vimeo.