Topic: Stars & Nebulae
Closer Look: Rubin Observatory

Closer Look: Rubin Observatory

by | Jun 25, 2025 | , , , ,

In the early 2000s, the massive scientific return from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey made it clear that there are questions we can only answer by investing in systems that survey the sky and inventory everything visible. From learning about the distribution of galaxies by type to exploring the distribution of stars by age, that survey gave us a glimpse of just how much we don’t yet know. Apache Point hosts the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's telescope. Credit: SDSS The SDSS survey used a 2.5-m telescope to initially explore an 8,000 square degree area of the sky, and has since added new areas and...

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The mystery of ASKAP J1832-0911

The mystery of ASKAP J1832-0911

by | Jun 13, 2025 |

A graph of Chandra data and a fit to the data superimposed on an image that combines x-ray, IR, and radio data. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/ICRAR, Curtin Univ./Z. Wang et al.; Infrared: NASA/JPL/CalTech/IPAC; Radio: SARAO/MeerKAT; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk I...

Dying Stars’ Final Artwork

Dying Stars’ Final Artwork

by | May 7, 2025 |

One of the justifications for building the Hubble Space Telescope was to finally get a detailed enough view  of the fuzzy blobs we call planetary nebulae that we could finally understand what is going on. Turns out, for some of the nebulae, we actually needed...

Europa Clipper Joins in on the Star Observing

Europa Clipper Joins in on the Star Observing

by | Mar 11, 2025 |

It doesn’t take a lot of telescope to make the number of visible stars radically increase, in it turns out even the Europa clipper, with its several centimeter star tracker cameras, has been regularly making its own observations.  The Clipper launched  October 14,...

Don Pettit Proves Stars Can Be Tracked From ISS

Don Pettit Proves Stars Can Be Tracked From ISS

by | Jan 21, 2025 |

Photo taken by Astronaut Don Pettit from ISS: Milky Way with Zodiacal light and Starlink satellites streaking by. Astronaut Don Pettit is, among many other things, an amateur astronomer. One of the most delightful moments of my life with getting to hear him talk to...

A Star’s Death in Three Acts

A Star’s Death in Three Acts

by | Sep 4, 2024 |

While monitoring the sky with optical systems, we’ve found some really weird stuff. Back in 2018, the All Sky Automated Survey for Super Novae discovered a brightening galaxy. Follow -up observations in the X-Ray found the kinds of high energy light that signals a...