The word Novae generally refers to a “New Star,” or a “Guest Star” - An object that springs up in the sky quite suddenly as a new but non-permanent object. Today we give these non permanent sky features a dozen or more names: Supernovae (types I & II with all sorts of extra letters), Recurrent […]

Look out in the sky today, and you’ll see only a few kinds of galaxies. Most are elliptical, fuzzy round blobs containing billions of stars. Others are spirals, of course, flattened disks with magnificent spiral arms. Others are irregular in shape, and the fourth kind are peculiar; they have a definite shape (rings, for example) […]

If you want to understand what’s going on in the sky, there are lots of ways to do it. You can, for example, look around for specific examples of objects — supernovae, black holes, spiral galaxies — and examine them. Or, you can take a survey of the sky, looking everywhere, and take a census […]

At 9am the the IKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS) was released to the world. This survey was started in 2005 when the world’s largest and most sensitive IR instrument was commissioned on IKIRT. It is able to survey the sky faster and deeper than anything else. Hubble Deep Field , move over, there is […]

The LSST held a quick press briefing outside their booth today. Mostly they wanted to talk about the recent $30 million donation from Google and Microsoft, but it was a small enough group that questions could pull it any which way.
LSST is going to be very exciting. By the time the survey is over, every […]