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Moore Foundation funds detector research

October 28, 2008 By
Artists impression of the 30-m primary mirror of the Thirthy Meter Telescope (TMT)

Artist's impression of the 30-m primary mirror of the Thirthy Meter Telescope (TMT)

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation recently awarded $2.8 million to researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology for the development of noiseless detectors in the framework of the Thirty Meter Telescope project. This is really good news for astronomers: not only is it a significant amount of money invested in a hugely important area of our science, the Foundation’s high profile helps raise awareness of the value of this work. Personally I’m happy this research is being carried out at a research institution rather than a private company, as corporate strategies are not always compatible with the “niche applications” that astronomy instruments usually are.

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Hubble brought back to life

October 28, 2008 By

Last weekend NASA released this statement about the Hubble Space Telescope – and it’s good news! The computer was brought out of the quiescent mode it had been waiting in since the shut down on 16 October. Some engineering checks showed that everything was healthy and ready to restart science operations last Saturday. I haven’t seen anything since, so fingers crossed!

In another welcome development, NASA added an RSS feed for the updates.

A big pat on the back to all the rescue engineers at NASA!

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IPhone mystery illness

October 25, 2008 By

Since arriving in the US last week my IPhone hasn’t been working properly and it’s really been bugging me. Since a couple of days I’ve figured out what the problem is – but I haven’t heard about it before and I’m sure it’s not supposed to happen.

Essentially the screen goes white and the phone reboots itself – irrespective of whether I’m actually using it at the time. Sometimes I could use it for half an hour before it would reboot, sometimes just 10 seconds. Very annoying!

I tried everything I could think of: a full factory reset, losing my applications, restarting etc all to no avail.

Now I’ve discovered that it works perfectly in airplane mode, i.e. without its phone funcionality but with wifi. So the problem is clearly related to the US mobile phone networks. I’m happy that I can use my phone again, albeit as an iPod touch, but I’m very curious about this problem. Anyone have any similar experiences or ideas?!

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APOD: The wonky disk of NGC7331

October 22, 2008 By
Spiral galaxy NGC7331

Spiral galaxy NGC7331

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is really gorgeous. This image of spiral galaxy NGC7331, found in the constellation of Pegasus and located at a distance of approximately 50 million lightyears, was taken with the optical LAICA instrument on the Zeiss 3.5-m telescope at Calar Alto Observatory in Spain. The exquisite quality of the picture shows the clear warping in the disk of the galaxy.  Commonly observed in spiral galaxies, warped disks are thought to be the result of past encounters with other galaxies, or some kind of gravitational interaction with other nearby galaxies.

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Hubble still on sick leave

October 20, 2008 By

I’m a bit late to report the latest on Hubble because of my travels, but I thought I’d post a heads up on what’s going on after all. Last week, NASA engineers managed to switch the telescope communications over to use the redundant side. But when they attempted to reboot the telescope  not everything went as expected. In a news conference last Friday, NASA explained that Hubble is now in safe mode, while engineers try to figure out precisely what has happened, and how to fix it.

A number of status reports from NASA can be found here. Good coverage is given on Ars Technica, the Planetary Society Blog, Wired Science and Bad Astronomy – so you can read up in detail there!

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