Professor Astronomy's Astronomy Blog | |
| While I sit in the clouds and rain over the next couple of days, I'm going to try some upgrades to this blog. So, if you were trying to read this and getting errors, or if there are several broken... | |
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| Since Thursday evening, I've been at McDonald Observatory in west Texas. And, since Thursday, it has been raining, foggy, cloudy, and generally miserable. Not much optical astronomy can be done in... | |
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| Image Credit: Jon Lomberg/ NASA
I went to the mountains because I wished to observe deliberately, to front only the essential facts of astronomy, to see if I could not learn what the stars had... | |
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| For the first time since my arrival here last Thursday, I was able to see sunset. I took this picture (actually a montage of two pictures) this evening. You can see the crepuscular rays (the sun... | |
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| Finally, I'm getting decent-quality data. I only had to wait 5 nights. | |
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| Image Credit: NOAO/ NSO
Yesterday I blogged about the Kepler Mission and how it will be looking for Earth-like planets around sun-like stars. But, as I said, Kepler can do more than find... | |
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| Image Credit: K. Williams/T. Jones/McDonald Observatory
Over the past couple of days, I've slowly been telling the story of my observing run. I hope you'll forgive the length, but I thought it... | |
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| We found a variable white dwarf in the Kepler field! Our European collaborators found it, and we obtained confirmation data here in Texas. There's still more follow-up needed, but we got our needle... | |
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| Looks like I lied when I said I'd be talking more about what we found. My collaborators want it kept under wraps for now. So, all I can say is, we found something interesting, but we aren't sure it... | |
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| Image Credit: NASA
The graphic above shows the space debris that NASA follows around the Earth. Most of this is just junk, pieces of spacecraft and satellites that have disintegrated (or that... | |
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