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Refrigerated Digital Camera Used to Take Amazing Space Pictures
Posted by Jesus Diaz at 8:30 AM on November 30, 2008
Greg Parker is a professor of electronics at Southampton University. He's also a wizard. Like his co-author Noel Carboni. Real wizards, capable of obtaining images rivaling the best of Hubble's using less than $US15,000 in equipment and more patience than any money in the world could buy. Their magic: A refrigerated CCD chip inside a special digital camera, a manually-operated dome, and some smart post processing in Photoshop.
Although still three years from starting actual scientific missions, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) airborne observatory is tenaciously getting closer to its first job day. After two decades of research and $US500 million modding a Boeing 747--including the 2.5-metre telescope itself that you can see tested in this video--SOFIA got a High-speed Imaging Photometer for Occultation two weeks ago, an instrument that will help it to measure objects' surfaces and atmospheres. Now, NASA is completing final tests at their Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility before its first open-door flight later this year.
Just in time for the Christmas season, Hawaii will get to turn on one of four new asteroid (and Santa) tracking telescopes, which can scan large swaths of the sky quickly and clearly thanks to a 1.4-billion pixel digital camera with image stabilisation. The first prototype of the project, known as Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), will take pictures three times a month of as much of space as it can see from the peak of Mount Haleakala in Maui. It'll be used as Earth's first defence against Armageddon-like planet-rocking meteors.
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 
The Hubble space telescope, despite 
The Hubble Telescope, which was quite nearly lost this month to a combination of 
Hold the phone, people, the Hubble is still broken. There was word early Thursday morning that a Monkey Island-era 
Prospects were starting to look pretty grim for the venerable Hubble telescope. Following a 
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.
