Telescopes come in an overwhelming variety
of sizes, shapes, and prices. To make sense of this embarrassment of
riches, you need to ask yourself a few basic questions.
The author owns a half dozen scopes, including the 70-mm refractor at left and the 12.5-inch truss-tube Dob at right.
Carla Procaskey
How much are you willing to spend? How portable does your telescope need
to be? Do you plan to do astrophotography? And what do you hope for and
expect from astronomy?
ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2012)
— A Martian dust storm that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been
tracking since last week has also produced atmospheric changes
detectable by rovers on Mars.
This nearly
global mosaic of observations made by the Mars Color Imager on NASA's
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 18, 2012, shows a dust storm in
Mars' southern hemisphere. Small white arrows outline the area where
dust from the storm is apparent in the atmosphere. (Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
Using the orbiter's Mars Color Imager, Bruce Cantor of Malin Space
Science Systems, San Diego, began observing the storm on Nov. 10, and
subsequently reported it to the team operating NASA's Mars Exploration
Rover Opportunity. The storm came no closer than about 837 miles (1,347
kilometers) from Opportunity, resulting in only a slight drop in
atmospheric clarity over that rover, which does not have a weather
station.
NASA dangles big, secret Mars discovery, but we don't want to wait
A discovery said to be "one for the history books" has been made by SAM,
a suite of science instruments aboard NASA's Curiosity. Here, workers
inside a clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La
Canada-Flintridge prepare to install SAM into the rover.
(NASA/JPL-Caltech / January 6, 2011)
By Amy Hubbard
November 21, 2012, 7:53 a.m.
As Curiosity prepares for Thanksgiving on Mars, rover fans have been left hanging about a discovery from the Red Planet that a NASA official has billed as a big one.
Just you wait, NASA says.
Not everyone wants to. Curiosity's Facebook page had one
early-morning comment from a fan: "WHAT IS IT?!?!" Mars watchers were
expressing the same sentiments on Twitter.
NPR
stirred things up Tuesday with a report in which John Grotzinger,
principal investigator for the rover mission, called the news a
discovery for the history books: "This data is ... looking really good,"
he said. The scientist told NPR it would be several weeks before NASA
had anything to say. Researchers are being very careful to make sure
they get it right before they blab.
Dark matter detector nearing activation in SD mine
By AMBER HUNT Associated Press
Posted:
11/20/2012 12:14:21 PM PST
Updated:
11/20/2012 02:27:32 PM PST
Click photo to enlarge
In this July 31, 2012 photo provided by Sanford... ((AP Photo/Courtesy Sanford Lab, Matt Kapust))
SIOUX
FALLS, S.D.—Scientists hoping to detect dark matter deep in a former
South Dakota gold mine have taken the last major step before flipping
the switch on their delicate experiment and say they may be ready to
begin collecting data as early as February.
What's regarded as
the world's most sensitive dark matter detector was lowered earlier this
month into a 70,000-gallon water tank nearly a mile beneath the earth's
surface, shrouding it in enough insulation to hopefully isolate dark
matter from the cosmic radiation that makes it impossible to detect
above ground.
And if all goes as planned, the data that
begins flowing could answer age-old questions about the universe and its
origins, scientists said Monday.
Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) (Source: Wikipedia.org )
On August 14, 2012, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of
Astronomical Sciences Portfolio Review Committee issued a report
entitled: Advancing Astronomy in the Coming Decade; Opportunities and
Challenges. In that report, the NSF recommended that two NRAO
instruments, the GBT and the Very Long Based Array (VLBA) in New Mexico,
be fully divested from the NSF Astronomy Division’s research facilities
portfolio within five years.
At over sixteen million pounds and a construction cost of $95 million,
the Green Bank Telescope, as it is known, is the largest, most capable
fully steerable single dish radio telescope in the World. It is able to
precisely point its 2.3 acres of light-collecting surface area anywhere
within all but the southernmost 15 percent of the celestial sphere. An
engineering and scientific marvel, it is unlikely to be recreated, much
less surpassed, by American astronomy for decades to come.
A private race to the moon with robotic probes may kick off a lunar
"water rush" that helps humanity explore asteroids, Mars and other
deep-space destinations, some scientists say.
The 25 privately funded teams competing in the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize
may perform vital prospecting work that will lay the foundation for
large-scale exploitation of moon water, leading to cheaper and more efficient space exploration, the idea goes.
"This is like the gold rush that led to the settlement of California,"
Phil Metzger, a physicist at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida,
said in a statement. "This is the water rush."
Dr. John Cramer
SEATTLE -- Physicists,
mathematicians, philosophers and that guy talking to himself on a street
corner all have opinions about validity of time travel.
So does Dr. John Cramer, Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Washington. He wants to make it a reality.
But
Cramer's form of time travel is not the teleportation characterized by
Hollywood and science fiction. As time travel goes, Cramer thinks in
baby steps. He's working on the possibility receiving a message
milliseconds before it's sent.
"I have to admit, this is pushing
the envelope and often the envelop pushes back," says Cramer, a nuclear
physicist who has worked on projects involving the Large Hadron Collider
in Switzerland.
In the basement of the campus physics building,
Cramer is fiddling with laser beams to prove what Einstein called
"spooky action at a distance". He's splitting photons through a series
of synthetic crystals to demonstrate that quantum non-locality can be
used to communicate.
For those of us who never took high school
physics, this is what he's trying to do in layman's terms: If you took a
pair of photons created at the same time and altered one of those
photons, in theory the other photon would be altered instantly -- even
if it was separated by an entire galaxy.
That would mean
communication could travel faster than the speed of light over long
distances. The ramifications of something Einstein didn't think was
possible but theoretically could happen would be incredible. Physicists
call it "nonlocal quantum communication."
November 19 marks the 71st anniversary (1941) of the dedication of
the Astronomical Observatory at Pittsburgh's original Buhl Planetarium
and Institute of Popular Science: Link >>> http://buhlplanetarium2.tripod.com/
