Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Domains

Domain: aavso.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to aavso.org.

Stories · 3

  1. Local Galaxy Cluster About to Go Boom

    Science · Space · · posted by timothy · from the about-to-is-relative dept. · 19 comments
    A. Price writes "The Slacker Astronomy podcast reports on a recently discovered super star cluster located just 10,000 light years away. This system is expected to spawn 1500 supernovae in about 40 million years. I don't plan to be around to see the fireworks, but I wish I could. The show will be awesome. SA is a weekly look at astronomy by astronomers as told by a 20-something gal from Harvard and two of her friends. It's funny and cheesy, like the Dr. Who of podcasts."

  2. Discovering Extrasolar Planets in Your Backyard

    Science · Science · · posted by timothy · from the if-your-backyard-is-dark-enough dept. · 14 comments
    RobertFisher writes: "As professional astronomers have continuned to build ever more powerful telescopes, the role of amateur astronomers has diminished substantially, mainly to monitoring variable stars and discovering comets. Now a group of professional astronomers at UC Santa Cruz are beginning an exciting new project, to discover extrasolar planets using a network of amateur astronomers who will monitor candidate stars for transits of extrasolar planets. From their website : '...the past several years have seen the introduction of highly affordable small telescopes equipped with sensitive and stable CCD (charge coupled device) detectors, and controlled by laptop computers. Thousands of amateur astronomers already own observatories which, when properly configured, are capable of reliably detecting the periodic dimming which occurs when a close-in giant planet passes in front of the parent star as seen from Earth.'"

  3. Supernova Discovered

    Science · Space · · posted by timothy · from the amateur-hour's-brightest-stars dept. · 34 comments
    hey! writes: "A supernova was found last Wednesday in the M74 galaxy (announcment can be found here :http://www.aavso.org/newsflash/nf904.shtml. It is not visible to the naked eye, but was discovered with at 10 inch telescope and is getting brighter -- it may be visible in amateur instruments as small as 4", according to Lew Gramer of the IAAC list. More information is available at seds.org including a very nice before and after picture."