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I remember when Richard Nixon resigned. Even though I was only 12 at the time, I had a general understanding that our country’s president had done something wrong, got caught, and needed to step aside. “By taking this action,” Nixon said in his national address on August 8, 1974, “I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.” Fast forward to 2023: A former president faces 91 felony charges for crimes ranging from falsifying business records to the “willful retention of national defense information,” from violating the Georgia...

(International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/A. Smith) ============================================================ In a stormy Hawaiian sky in July 2017, streaks of red and blue lightning seemed to meet above a bed of white light. Cameras on the Gemini North telescope at the Gemini Observatory in Mauna Kea snapped a stunning picture of the multi-colored light show. The National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) released the photo on Wednesday as its "image of the week". The lightning in the image "appears so otherworldly that it looks like it must be a special effect," NOIRLab said. It also published a zoomable version. These colorful lightning phenomena are aptly...

(AP) -- The massive jolt that rocked Hawaii damaged some of the world's most advanced equipment for gazing into outer space. Scientists at many of the 13 telescopes atop Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on the Big Island, are still examining their implements to gauge the extent of the problems. Many have suspended their celestial observations to inspect equipment for flaws. Christian Veillet, executive director of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, said an encoder - a device enabling astronomers to keep track of what part of the sky they are looking at - had a chunk taken out of it when Sunday's...

Scientists are over the moon at the W.M. Keck Observatory and the California Institute of Technology over a new discovery of a satellite orbiting the Solar System's 10th planet (2003 UB313). The newly discovered moon orbits the farthest object ever seen in the Solar System. The existence of the moon will help astronomers resolve the question of whether 2003 UB313, temporarily nicknamed "Xena," is more massive than Pluto and hence the 10th planet. A paper describing the discovery was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters on October 3, 2005. "We were surprised because this is a completely different type of...

HONOLULU - Astronomers using a giant telescope atop a volcano have discovered a hot spot at the tip of Saturn's south pole. The infrared images captured by the Keck I telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea on the Big Island suggest a warm polar vortex — a large-scale weather pattern likened to a jet stream on Earth that occurs in the upper atmosphere. It's the first such hot vortex ever discovered in the solar system. The team of scientists say the images are the sharpest thermal views of Saturn ever taken from the ground. Their work will...

Peering back in time to when the universe was just 750 million years old, a team of astrophysicists announced Sunday they have spied a tiny galaxy that is the most farthest known object. "We are confident it is the most distant known object," California Institute of Technology astronomer Richard Ellis said of the galaxy, which lies roughly 13 billion light-years from Earth. The team uncovered the faint galaxy using the two most powerful telescopes of their kind – one in space, the other in Hawaii – aided by the natural magnification provided by a massive cluster of galaxies. The gravitational...

Astronomers have observed a young star ringed by a swirling disc that may spin off planets, marking the first published science observation using two linked 10-meter (33- foot) telescopes in Hawaii. The linked telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, known as the Keck Interferometer, comprise the world's largest optical telescope system. The observation was made of DG Tau, a young star that has not yet begun to burn hydrogen in its core. Such stars are called T-Tauri objects. Observations of DG Tau were made on October 23, 2002, and February 13, 2003, and the findings will appear...

Io Surface Captured in Full Motion Surface details captured with Keck adaptive optics in the K-band (upper left) show a comparable level of detail to visible light picture taken with the NASA Galileo orbiter (upper right). The L-band image (lower left) is dominated by active volcanic hot spot emissions, such as Loki, located near the center of the disk. These spots can now be monitored from the ground. An image of Io without adaptive optics (lower right) shows what the keck telescope would see without adaptive optics. Note that no hot spots are detected in this image. More Images and...