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Circa 1911: Cat drinking from a bottle and looking through a telescope

Explanation: For an Earth-orbiting gamma-ray telescope, Earth is actually the brightest source of gamma-rays, the most energetic form of light. Gamma-rays from Earth are produced when high energy particles, cosmic rays from space, crash into the atmosphere. While that interaction blocks harmful radiation from reaching the surface, those gamma-rays dominate in this remarkable Earth and sky view from the orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope's Large Area Telescope. The image was constructed using only observations made when the center of our Milky Way galaxy was near the zenith, directly above the Fermi satellite. The zenith is mapped to the center of...

Explanation: Why are these people shooting a powerful laser into the center of our Galaxy? Fortunately, this is not meant to be the first step in a Galactic war. Rather, astronomers at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) site in Chile are trying to measure the distortions of Earth's ever changing atmosphere. Constant imaging of high-altitude atoms excited by the laser -- which appear like an artificial star -- allow astronomers to instantly measure atmospheric blurring. This information is fed back to a VLT telescope mirror which is then slightly deformed to minimize this blurring. In this case, a VLT was...

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a freakish asteroid with six comet-like tails of dust streaming from its body like spokes on a wheel, scientists said on Thursday.

Okay, but what exactly is a gravitational wave and how could they help us crack the conundrum of the black hole code? A gravitational wave is akin to a ripple in space-time. Albert Einstein predicted that massive bodies changing speed or direction generate these gravitational waves. Picture bodies like a pair of black holes orbiting each other. This then creates a gravitational wave that ripples outwards, like a disturbance in a still pool of water after a leaf has dropped onto its surface and ripples are sent across the surface. Like star-crossed lovers, the black holes of two merging galaxies...

Molten sphere could give clues to planetary mass Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered a new, Earth-sized exoplanet for which orbiting its star is literally all in a day's work.The newly discovered planet, dubbed Kepler 78b, completes one full revolution around its star in just 8.5 hours – fast enough that by the time you clock in at the office and clock out again, another solar year will have passed for Kepler 78b. To achieve this rapid orbital period, the planet revolves around its star at a distance 40 times closer than Mercury is to our sun.As...

There might not be a man on the moon right now—but there may soon be a gazing eye. A new private venture aims to build a long-range telescope on our planet's little satellite, and it could happen as soon 2016. A partnership between Moon Express, Inc. and the International Lunar Observatory Association is all set to install the telescope on the humble lump of rock. The plan is to position the 2-meter dish antenna, known as the International Lunar Observatory, on the rim of a crater near the moon’s South pole. The first step will be a proof-of-concept mission, which...

Launched in March 2009, NASA's Kepler space telescope has detected more than 3,000 potential alien planets. But that exoplanet hunt stalled in mid-May of this year, when the second of Kepler's four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed, hobbling the spacecraft. Since then, the Kepler team has been working on possible fixes for the reaction wheels and plans to try them out out in the coming weeks, officials said... Kepler spots exoplanets by noting the telltale brightness dips caused when they cross their parent stars' faces from the instrument's perspective. This is precision work, and the observatory needs three functioning gyroscope-like reaction...

Our solar system is full of moons. Of the 8 major planets, 6 of them have at least one natural satellite in tow, and several of those moons are very interesting places. Icy moons in the outer solar system may even be secretly harboring life. But what about moons elsewhere in the galaxy? The Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler (HEK) is an astronomy project intended to try and find exomoons. And not just any exomoons; the kind of moons that could be a haven for life. While the Kepler telescope has, sadly, been forced into retirement, the data it collected...

SETIÂ’s Colossus by Paul Gilster on May 31, 2013 For the most part, the focus of SETI since Project Ozma has been directed at intercepting signals deliberately sent our way. It doesnÂ’t have to be so, of course, because extraneous signals from a civilization going about its business would also be profoundly interesting, and even a civilization not much more advanced than ours might be throwing off powerful evidence of its existence through the planetary radars it uses to detect potential impactors in its own system. Whether or not the Ohio State WOW! signal was a SETI detection remains unresolved,...

Kulesa and his team communicate with the telescope remotely via satellite, sending it new orders and instructions throughout the year, and downloading new data. They also keep a watchful eye on their experiment through a webcam, which sends image updates from roughly 9,000 miles away roughly every hour. Why Antarctica, though? Even the smallest amount of water vapor in Earth's atmosphere absorbs terahertz-frequency light from space before it reaches a telescope on Earth... From Tucson, Kulesa said, it's about 5-10 millimeters deep in winter and up to 40 millimeters deep during monsoon season in summer. At the telescope site in...

The massive Thirty Meter Telescope will be able to image objects 13 billion light years away, near the beginning of time. Set atop Mauna Kea, the Thirty Meter Telescope will be able to observe planets outside our solar system. (Credit: Courtesy TMT Observatory Corporation) If you love eye-popping images of space, here's welcome news: the Hawaiian Board of Land and Natural Resources has backed building what's to be the world's largest, most powerful optical telescope above the clouds atop the volcano Mauna Kea. The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will have a primary mirror of 492 segments measuring some 100 feet...

Explanation: Cosmic dust clouds ripple across this infrared portrait of our Milky Way's satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. In fact, the remarkable composite image from the Herschel Space Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope show that dust clouds fill this neighboring dwarf galaxy, much like dust along the plane of the Milky Way itself. The dust temperatures tend to trace star forming activity. Spitzer data in blue hues indicate warm dust heated by young stars. Herschel's instruments contributed the image data shown in red and green, revealing dust emission from cooler and intermediate regions where star formation is just...

Explanation: In silhouette against the colorful evening twilight, clouds part for this much anticipated magic moment. The scene captures naked-eye Comet PanSTARRS peeking into northern hemisphere skies on March 12. The comet stands over the western horizon after sunset, joined by the thin, flattened crescent of a day old Moon. Posing for its own beauty shot, the subtly lit dome of the 4.2 meter William Herschel Telescope is perched above cloud banks on the Canary Island of La Palma. While PanSTARRS has not quite developed into the spectacular comet once hoped for, it is still growing easier to see in...

I am looking at buying my first astronomical instrument. I have a budget of under $150. I was thinking of these two as possibilities: 1: Celestron SkyMaster 20x80 Binoculars2: Orion SkyScanner 100mm TableTop Reflector Telescope Any recommendations would be appreciated. Thanks.

Explanation: Sweeping quickly through southern skies on March 5, Comet PanSTARRS (C/2011 L4) follows the Sun toward the western horizon in this twilight scene. In the foreground is Australia's CSIRO Parkes Radio Telescope, a 64 meter wide steerable dish that is no stranger to the space age exploration of comets. In March of 1986 the Parkes dish tracked ESA's Giotto spacecraft as it flew by Comet Halley and received the first ever closeup images of Halley's nucleus. At naked-eye visibility, Comet PanSTARRS made its closest approach to planet Earth on March 5. Its closest approach to the Sun will be...

Explanation: This infrared view from the Herschel Space Observatory explores the Andromeda Galaxy, the closest large spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way. Only 2.5 million light-years distant, the famous island universe is also known to astronomers as M31. Andromeda spans over 200,000 light-years making it more the twice the size of the Milky Way. Shown in false color, the image data reveal the cool dust lanes and clouds that still shine in the infrared but are otherwise dark and opaque at visual wavelengths. Red hues near the galaxy's outskirts represent the glow of dust heated by starlight to a...

Explanation: The aftermath of a cosmic cataclysm, supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A) is a comfortable 11,000 light-years away. Light from the Cas A supernova, the death explosion of a massive star, first reached Earth just 330 years ago. Still expanding, the explosion's debris cloud spans about 15 light-years near the center of this composite image. The scene combines color data of the starry field and fainter filaments of material at optical energies with image data from the orbiting NuSTAR X-ray telescope. Mapped to false colors, the X-ray data in blue hues trace the fragmented outer ring of the expanding...

LOS ANGELES - The Spitzer telescope's examination of hundreds of stars has found evidence that the times it takes to form an Earth-sized planet may last hundreds instead of tens of millions of years. The telescope revealed dust rings around nearby stars that couldn't have survived long unless violent collisions between gigantic chunks of rock were replenishing them, scientists said during a press conference Monday at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Scientists have long believed that planets are formed when the dust in a disc-like formation around a young star begins to clump. Some of the clumps eventually grow...

London: Researchers will be focussing on studying planets around other stars will in a new small Science Program mission, Cheops that is expected to launch in 2017, ESA has announced. Cheops -- for CHaracterising ExOPlanets Satellite -- will target nearby, bright stars already known to have planets orbiting around them. Through high-precision monitoring of the star's brightness, scientists will search for the telltale signs of a 'transit' as a planet passes briefly across its face. In turn, this will allow an accurate measurement of the radius of the planet. For those planets with a known mass, the density will be...