What’s Up this Week: November 27 – December 3, 2006
Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! Sister Selene is back en force, so why not take a few evenings to catch up on…
The Last of the Great Observatories
The Spitzer telescope targets the infrared portion of the light spectrum. It also happens to have been one of the…
Astrophoto: Van den Bergh 152 by Giovanni Benintende
Go to a public place where people gather such as a rush hour sidewalk downtown or a weekend shopping mall…
Pan Clearing a Gap in Saturn’s Rings
If you want to understand what causes the gaps in Saturn's rings, just look at this picture. The bright object…
Starburst Galaxy NGC 1313
This is an image of galaxy NGC 1313, taken with the FORS instrument at the ESO's Very Large Telescope. It's…
What Venus and Saturn Have in Common
Astronomers have known about a strange vortex at the south pole of Venus since the 1970s, when it was discovered…
Double Supernovae in a Distant Galaxy
NASA's Swift satellite has found a galaxy positively popping with supernovae. NGC 1316 has had two supernovae go off in…
Back to Venus with Vesper
While Venus is the same size as our Earth, its hellish surface environment makes it inhospitable to life. What went…
NASA Losing Hope for Mars Global Surveyor
NASA is starting to lose hope that they'll be able to communicate with the Mars Global Surveyor, which hasn't called…
Podcast: A Universe of Dark Energy
The discovery of dark energy was one of the biggest surprises in astronomy. Instead of a nice, predictable expanding Universe,…