Professor Astronomy's Astronomy Blog

Changes afoot

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...

Walking around in a fog

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...

Why I Went to the Mountains (Part 1)

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...

Finally, a clear night

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...

Woohoo!

Finally, I'm getting decent-quality data. I only had to wait 5 nights.

Why I Went to the Mountains (Part 2)

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...

Why I Went to the Mountains, Part 3

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...

Breaking News: We found one!

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...

I lied

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...

Space Shuttle At Risk From Space Junk?

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...