Category: Observations

Observations

January 13, 2013

An update on the Siding Spring Observatory

A short followup of my post sent last night with a good news through an official announcement by the Australian National University  posted today. In a nutshell, no telescopes have suffered major damages from the bush fire, but the astronomer's lodge, the ...

September 10, 2012

Another fireball on Jupiter?

An amateur astronomer reported the visual detection of a fireball on Jupiter at 11:35 UT (September 10 2012) last night. It was confirmed on a video recorded from Texas. This is the 6th impact of Jupiter detected so far. Astronomer Dan ...

June 11, 2012

Venus Transit: From San Francisco in 2012 to Mars in 2030

If you read this blog, I am certain that you are aware of the Venus Transit which occurred  from  22:09 UTC on 5 June 2012 to 04:49 UTC on 6 June (3:09pm to 8:49pm PDT). Because this astronomical event was visible from North America, Europe, and part ...

September 29, 2011

An ELT made of cardboard in your garden?

I am calling myself a Planetary Astronomer, essentially because I use ground-based telescopes to study our solar system bodies. Even if I often write posts on this blog  about the wonderful results brought to us by space missions, space stations ...

July 21, 2011

An Occultation by the double asteroid (90) Antiope seen in California

Last Tuesday July 19 at 3:25am PDT, several SETI REU students and colleagues from SETI institute and Observatoire de Paris were on the road. They were looking at the sky with  tiny telescopes and surrounding by complex instruments somewhere ...

August 11, 2010

FIRST@LICK: First fringes! Finally…

Already three nights on the telescope and we still have no fringes... It looks worrisome but in fact we anticipated difficulties in installing FIRST prototype which is essentially a lab testbench on the Shane telescope. The good news is that ...

August 10, 2010

FIRST@LICK: Two nights hunting for the fringes

As I mentioned before, the Grail of our experiment called FIRST, is to record patterns of interference fringes. Using these "images" we should be able to reconstruct an image with a high dynamic at proximity of the star, allowing us ...

August 9, 2010

FIRST@LICK: first photons from a star

After two long days of work we decided to point the telescope on the bright star called Eta Pegasi (Matar). I remind you that it was already 4am PDT so we were all quite exhausted and we had only a short amount of ...

August 9, 2010

FIRST@LICK: Getting ready for the first night

After a complicated mounting of the instrument on the telescope, we spent the entire first 2 days and a large part of the beginning of the night, reinstalling and realigning the FIRST instrument. JUly 23 and July 24 were  busy ...

July 25, 2010

FIRST@LICK: Setting up the prototype

On July 14 (Bastille day), shortly after we received the crates, Guy Perrin, astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris and Elsa Huby, a graduate student at the observatoire de Paris, arrived  the first time at the Lick Observatory. The picture ...