The William Herschel Telescope at sunset. . The William Herschel Telescope was for many years the biggest and best optical telescope in Europe (until GranTeCan opened in 2009). The main mirror is 4.2 m across (165″, or 13′ 9″) which astronomers call “a good light bucket”. It’s rather old as world-class telescopes go, since it opened in 1987, but it still produced excellent science. In fact data from the WHT…
Click on the picture to go to the NASA website, where you can explore a million-pixel photo of Mars. You can zoom in anywhere!
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was discovered by the English scientist Robert Hooke in 17th century. It lies very close to the giant planet’s equator and its major axis is 40,000 km (twice the diameter of the Earth. We now know that it’s a hurricane, which rotates anticlockwise with wind speeds around the edge of up to 400 km / sec. Photo taken by NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe.
This wonderful photo of Saturn was taken by NASA’s Cassini mission on Sept. 15, 2006. The sun is behind the planet, giving a wonderful view of the rings. Even more spectacular, you can just see the Earth at the left.
Partial Lunar eclipses are quite common. Photos like this aren’t. It was taken by Ana Garcia of AstroLaPalma.com, who offer observations (tours or private), telescope rental, the “Los Indianos” tour in Santa Cruz de La Palma and tailored astronomy travel packages.
The European Space Agency have released this lovely video of the Horsehead Nebula in visible and infrared wavelengths. The Horsehead Nebula is in Orion’s Belt. It’s an area of dust and gas in space where stars are being born.