sarahaskew.net
Cordon Macon, a candidate site of the E-ELT
I recently spotted this great image on the ESO website, where it was “ESO Chile Image of the Month” a while ago. It’s an eastward view over Cordon Macon, located in the Argentinian province of Salta and one of the candidate sites for the European Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT. The equipment used for monitoring of the site is just a tiny speck on the ridge, shown enlarged in the inset.
As part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, 365 Days of Astronomy will bring you a different podcast every single day of the year about a topic in astronomy. You may remember that I blogged about the initiative before.
Pamela Gay (the Starstryder) and Michael Koppelman have just posted up a first podcast on the website with some useful information about getting involved in 365 Days. If you’re shy about your voice (like me), you can just email in your script and someone else may be able to record your podcast; alternatively, if you have no faith in your writing skills, you can just lend your voice! A calendar is also posted at the site with memorable dates in astronomy, anniversaries of discoveries and the like for inspiration.
And best of all, the podcast debuts the fabulous theme tune by George Hrab. Warning: it’s really catchy!
Following its launch on 22 October, Indian lunar probe Chandrayaan-1 successfully settled into orbit around the Moon a couple of days ago, on 8 November. Just a few days before, Chandrayaan beamed back some fantastic images of the Earth from its journey towards our companion satellite. The probe is now in a highly elliptical orbit passing oevr the Lunar poles, from where it will slowly descend to a much closer-in orbit at an altitude of just 100 km over the Lunar surface.
From there the Moon Impact Probe (MIP) will be released to hit the surface.
Chandrayaan is India’s first scientific space mission.
On 13 November NASA will hold a news conference to report on “a significant discovery about planets orbiting other stars” with the Hubble Space Telescope.
First of all, whatever the discovery is, what an excellent piece of news for the recently troubled Hubble! And I’m super curious as to what we’ll get to hear. Exoplanet discoveries are always exciting stuff, and a “major discovery” sounds promising indeed.
The announcement also reports that the science result will appear in the edition of Science to be published on Friday 14 November.
Over at Orbiting Frog, Rob has posted up the slides of a recent talk he gave entitled “Astronomy in a Paperless Universe”. It shows all sorts of graphs and statistics on the influence of web-based publication platforms such as astro-ph and NASA’s Astrophysics Data System (ADS) on publications and citations.
Latest ResearchBlogging posts
Connect