Monthly Archives: February 2010

February 26, 2010

Willi Benz talks about extra-solar planets at ESO

Every week, on Thursday afternoons, ESO hosts the Munich Joint Astronomy Colloquium. This is organized by all the astronomical institutes in the Munich area (there are quite a few). The idea is to invite leading scientists to give an overview ...

February 25, 2010

Science Day at ESO

The staff of the European Organization for Astronomical Research (ESO) includes people coming from very different fields. Given the fact that we design, build and operate telescopes and instruments, our teams are composed by a mixture of mechanical, optical, electronic ...

February 24, 2010

SETI 25th Anniversary 3/6: life – what, where, how, when?

This is definitely the banner for which I am the least qualified to write about since I am not a biologist. It is, however a very important part of the SETI Institute research that needs to be fully acknowledged and ...

February 23, 2010

SETI Institute Anniversary 2/6: Its Majesty Mars: the Red Planet

If you are lucky and the sky is clear tonight, search for a red bright object in the Cancri constellation (Cancer), not too far from the stars Castor and Pollux in the Gemini constellation. As you may have already ...

February 19, 2010

SETI Institute Anniversary 1/6: The Milky Way Galaxy

It is getting more and more difficult to find a dark place, without night pollution and far from the smog of the cities, to be able to realize that we are part of a large barred spiral galaxy called the ...

February 18, 2010

Foggy day & Foggy mind – SETI Anniversary Colloquium

Today I was not sure I will find my office at UC-Berkeley. As you can see on this picture it was not an easy task and I had to rely on my instincts and my phone GPS to find it. ...

February 14, 2010

One trillion pixels (ob)served

WISE has observed and analyzed more than 250,000 framesets, each with 4 infrared colors using a megapixel array. So the total number of observed pixels in images with good image quality crossed over one trillion in last night's downloads. ...

February 14, 2010

A discussion about the US Space Science Budget (FY 2011 and beyond)

A few days ago, the Obama administration revealed the requested budget for FY 2011 which includes the budget for federal agencies such as NASA and NSF. Almost simultaneously, the NASA administrator Charles F. Bolden described in a speech the future ...

February 10, 2010

Beyond 2009

Well, I've been quiet for a while and its good to still be able to post here, so far 2010 has been a productive year! Last week I was out with the "Space Bus", which is single deck coach stripped ...

February 9, 2010

new comet WISE

Minor Planet Electronic Circular 2010-C23 announces the discovery of a comet by WISE: COMET P/2010 B2 (WISE). It's quite faint - about 20th magnitude in the optical.