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…
Francisco Sánchez, the founder of the Canarian Astrophysics Institute has resigned at the age of 77. Rafael Rebolo is the new director. Rafael Rebolo is an internationally known astrophysicist who has published over 150 scientific papers, mostly to do with exoplanets and cosmic microwave background. Francisco Sanchez is a hard act to follow. Francisco Sánchez, fundador del Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias ha jubilado a la edad de 77. Rafael…
“From its perch in the Saturn system, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft took pictures of Earth from nearly 900 million miles (nearly 1.5 billion kilometers) today. To celebrate the first time the public has had advance notice that Earth’s portrait was being taken from interplanetary distances, scientists and engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other Earthlings elsewhere gathered to wave at Saturn on July 19. Cassini took pictures of Earth between…
This is one photo I didn’t take myself – I wish! As you probably guessed, it’s a NASA photo, taken from the Space Shuttle in 2008. If you want to see the high-resolution version, together with some text about the geology of La Palma, and how the image was taken, click here.
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.