telescopes

SkyView lets you use your iPhone camera view to create an augmented-reality view of the sky complete with constellations, planets, and satellites. Simply launch the app and point your iPhone camera skyward to see constellations and other celestial bodies where they are in real time. You also can touch planets, stars, and constellations to get more info and history at the bottom of the screen.

While you can spend plenty of time simply pointing in different directions and viewing celestial bodies, SkyView offers a few more handy features for finding what you want. You can use the search tool to … Read more

A new telescope array could bring us closer to better understanding the universe and perhaps even answer an age-old question: are we alone?

Tapping into the combined power of 13,000 individual antennas, the new Long Wavelength Array will be able to scan our corner of the galaxy using a wide and rarely explored range of frequencies, according to NASA. That power will give it the ability to find new worlds beyond our solar system by scanning for their radio waves.

Led by the University of New Mexico and joined by NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, which is supplying the digital electronic systems, the project will start off small this summer by powering up 256 antennas in central New Mexico. Once it's completed, though, the Long Wavelength Array will contain 53 stations with the 13,000 antennas taking up a space 248 miles in diameter.

Beyond looking for distant worlds, the telescope array will be able to detect other events among the stars, those that occur naturally and possibly some that don't.… Read more

Using a powerful new camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered what appears to be the most distant object ever observed, a small proto galaxy some 13.2 billion light-years away that dates back to just 480 million years or so after the Big Bang birth of the universe.

The object was found in "deep field" images taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 that combined scores of optical and infrared exposures to capture a cosmic core sample showing nearby and increasingly distant galaxies. Showing up only in infrared light, the proto galaxy appears as … Read more

NASA management miscues threaten to drive up the cost of the agency's next generation space telescope by some $1.5 billion, an independent review panel reported today, pushing the overall cost of the project into the neighborhood of $6.5 billion. That's a best-case assessment that assumes the agency launches the observatory in 2015, the earliest realistic target.

But making that earliest possible launch date also assumes NASA comes up with an additional $250 million in both 2011 and 2012, an unlikely prospect in the current political environment. Barring a sudden infusion of cash, it's not yet … Read more

Deep-space stargazing, meet crowdsourcing.

For some time now, Google Sky has enabled users to view a wide range of imagery from high-level sources like the Hubble Telescope, NASA satellites, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. But the service has never provided a method for users to view community-created imagery, or to participate in the viewing of live events like eclipses.

Until now.

On Friday, Google announced a partnership with Slooh, a New York company that offers the public Internet-based access to a global network of observatories, and a diverse and constantly growing collection of telescopic viewing and photography "missions.&… Read more

Want an eye-popping view of the heavens but don't own a high-powered telescope or live near an observatory? Try building your own reflecting telescope. San Francisco-based designer Douglas Smith did just that after taking a course, and ended up creating a 10-foot monster with great optics and portability.

Smith took a class at the Randall Museum led by amateur astronomer John Dobson, long known for popularizing low-cost reflectors made of plywood and plastic. So-called Dobsonian telescopes are Newtonian reflecting telescopes consisting of a primary light-gathering mirror at the bottom and a secondary mirror near the top that reflects light into the viewfinder.

The unique feature of Smith's f/7.1 telescope is that the secondary mirror and viewfinder--a group called the Upper Tube Assembly--normally rests on long aluminum truss tubes. But when the instrument is being transported, Smith detaches the UTA so it nests inside the lower part of the scope, the plywood mirror box. Weighing about 160 pounds, the entire package rolls on wheels and can fit into a compact pickup truck.

It took Smith about four years working off and on and roughly $2,000 to build the telescope, which he dubbed FirstLight (similar commercial telescopes might cost around $2,000 and up). He used AutoCAD software to design it and Excel to confirm the critical balance point calculations, while friends helped with automated cutting of the plywood with a ShopBot machine.

The priciest components were the focuser, the truss tubes and connectors, and the plywood. Smith saved money by making his own 16.5-inch mirror, originally a flat, 1-inch-thick porthole glass.

"Grinding and polishing your own glass saves a lot of money, but the process is also time-consuming and one has to have a lot of patience," Smith said. "I spent a lot of time correcting mistakes in the learning process. I'm glad I did it, but it was challenging." … Read more

Microsoft has made a number of improvements to its Worldwide Telescope project, including partnering with NASA to offer much better imagery of the planet Mars.

In some cases, the imagery lets you get close enough to see details such as the tracks left by the Mars rovers.

"You can see the boulders and things like that," Dan Fay, director of Earth, Energy, and Environment for Microsoft Research. Microsoft previously teamed with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a Mars project that let youngsters and other space enthusiasts help count and label craters on the planet's surface.

With … Read more

On Tuesday, Mozilla revealed its Web browsing future with Firefox 4 beta 1. Apart from front-end changes such as tabs-on-top, a new Firefox menu button, and upgraded search functions in the URL field, the new beta has much to offer under the hood. Its upgrades include more HTML 5 support, including for the WebM video format that's been generating a lot of interest. You can expect to see a lot more Firefox news as Mozilla continues to develop this new beta version. In the meantime, check out Download.com's first look at Firefox 4 beta 1.

If you'… Read more

Turns out the iPhone grip of death is simply a "fact of life" with all wireless phones. If holding your phone makes your iPhone 4 signal drop dramatically, Apple would like you to know you should either hold it a different way or buy a case. From them. That sounds logical, right? Right. No, thanks. Also, introducing Rafe's new side project, oneleggedgoat.xxx. Enjoy.