The advantage of space telescopes like the aging Hubble are their ability to image distant astronomical objects without the fuzziness that Earth’s atmosphere produces. Of course, the big disadvantage is the hideous price-tag of getting the thing to orbit, keeping it there … and keeping it working. Astronomers from the UK’s Cambridge University have developed a neat hack that sidesteps the problem; so-called ‘lucky imaging’ works by comparing thousands of images from two or more ground-based telescopes and using the results to filter out the noise, producing results that rival the Hubble at its best – at a hundredth of a percent of the cost. [Image by Argenberg]
Tag Archives: space
Professor Hawking writes cosmic adventure for kids
Already a widely published man in his chosen field, Stephen Hawking is branching out into authordom of a different kind. In partnership with his daughter and a French scientist who wrote a thesis on his ideas, Hawking has written George’s Secret Key To The Universe – a space adventure story for children that explains the physics of the universe while (presumably) entertaining younger readers at the same time. I think we can safely assume that’s one science fiction story whose physics will never be questioned by hard sf purists … well, at least for a good few decades. [Image from Random House]
Virgin astronauts to undergo centrifuge training
Space tourism tickets are pretty pricey – partly because you’re not just paying for the flight itself, but a whole bunch of extras too. Wired reports that the first hundred people scheduled to head into sub-orbital space on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo are heading to Philadelphia for preliminary training sessions in centrifuges to get them accustomed to the G-forces of launch and reentry. I am insanely jealous.
The ultimate in space-geek memorabilia – a genuine Gemini spacesuit
We all collect things … some of us more obsessively than others. And we’re all proud of the highlights of our collections, those items that give us big kudos among those with similar interests. Which means that an unnamed friend of renowned artist COOP has secured the kudos crown among space-geeks, having located and purchased the only remaining Gemini spacesuit that wasn’t destroyed or put in a museum somewhere. That’s got to be well worth the re-mortgage he probably had to take out to buy it.
Cooking up supernovae in the lab
A detailed study of a supernova could tell scientists an awful lot of useful things … but there are obvious reasons why, even if we were able to travel the distances involved, we’d not want to just blast on over to check one out up close and personal. So, we do the next best thing – we recreate a some of the phenomena of a supernova under laboratory conditions.