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Meade ETX-LS Motorised GPS Telescope Basically Does Astronomy For You
Posted by Kit Eaton at 12:00 AM on November 15, 2008
Some details on Meade's ETX-LS telescope have snuck out ahead of its early 2009 launch, and it looks like an amateur telescope for the digital age. That's because it'll drive itself to locate the stars you've chosen to look at automatically, using its database, in-built GPS and electronic level-detector system. And then there's a sensor package built-in there too, with a CCD sensor so you can save photos to SD card or even stream video out. Plus there's a speaker so it'll tell you data from its internal "Astronomer-Inside" encyclopedia. Sure it's no Keck, but it's good if you like the idea of something doing all that tricky science stuff for you (shame on you). There's no firm pricing info yet. [TechDigest]
Huge astronomy news! For the first time EVER, galaxy researchers have taken pictures of planets orbiting a sun-star, much like our own. The first, taken by the much beloved Hubble Telescope, shows a planet orbiting the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Australis. The second picture, snapped by upstaging Hawaiian observatories Gemini and Keck, shows two young planets orbiting a completely different star located 130 light-years from us! Take that Hubble! But I warn you—like the ultrasounds your friends show you of their three-month old fetus—these pictures wow mostly because of what they are, not because of what they look like.
The Hubble Telescope, which was quite nearly lost this month to a combination of 
Using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, Dr Massimo Marengo--from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics--and Dr Dana Backman--from the SETI Institute--are claiming that there's a solar system which is a younger twin of our own, just 10.5 light-years from us. Nothing surprising, really, until they tell you that the star is called Epsilon Eridani. Which just happens to be, hold your tinfoil hats on, the legendary home star of 
A group of astronomers have taken the "Music of the Spheres" quite literally, and have recorded the sound of three stars that're similar to our Sun. The technique, dubbed stellar seismology, lets scientists get some idea about what's going on in the inner structure of the stars. This research was carried out using France's Corot space telescope, and the rhythmic beating in each "tune" shows that the stars are pulsing. But that clever and interesting science is not the eerie part. This is the eerie part: as you listen to the recordings, you'll be unavoidably reminded of the sound effects from the original series of Star Trek.
A new technology called nulling interferometry will give some of the world's biggest telescopes the power to detect Earth-like planets outside our solar system—something even the Hubble has not accomplished. Basically, nulling interferometry chains together the light captured by several large telescopes to create a single "super telescope" that has enough power to detect a quarter lying on the surface of the moon. Currently, an array of telescopes in Chile's Atacama Desert known as the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) is being outfitted with a nulling device called PRIMA.
For the first time ever, scientists have captured an spiral galaxy in its early stages of formation, only two billion years after the Big Bang. This time, however, they haven't used the 
The complicated 
Thanks to the distortion-reducing power of the 
This is exactly why we send 
