Category: Observations
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...