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Sorry for duplicated post

Compare the referred author picture of NGC 6888 here to a professional job there. The former is still very impressive for an amateur, indeed this is the verbatim comment from the IAC site (where the professional picture was taken):

NGC 6888 is out of the reach of an amateur telescope. The nebula can only be observed in deep images. Large telescopes like the 2.5-m Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma and narrow-band filters are needed to image the intricate structure of the gas shells.

correct Italian spelling: "Telescopio Nazionale Galileo" (not 'Telescopio Nationale Galileo' as written in the story blurb)

Photos of first-light, Telescope control testing (Writing GTC using Tycho as a pen!), and a beatuifull photo with a lo-res testing camera to UGC 10923 galaxy.
Here:
http://www.iac.es/divulgacion.php?op1=16&id=455

All right, answered my own question, looks like you can detect third bodies and odd geometries (like rings) by looking for non-symmetric parts in the intensity variation as it transits the star. Found this paper ftp://ftp.iac.es/tepstuff/lisbon98/deeglis98.pdf (PDF file, I can't vouch for the site.) which describes some of the variations in the shape.
I guess the camera has a high dynamic range but not particularly strong light collecting capabilities, which makes it ideal for doing this with bright, nearby stars, especially with all the assets already on orbit, where all that needs to be done is point and click. Pretty cool trick.

...the Cassini-Huygens spaceprobe made a descent over two years ago onto Titan, the only moon in the solar system known to have an atmosphere.

And the only two current, viable telescope proposals for telescopes larger than 10m

Hey! That's not fair! The GTC in the Canary Islands is 10.4 m. Choke on that!

I'm really just kidding. The GTC is pretty much a slightly larger version of Keck. It is really cool, though, and it's almost ready for first light.

And my wife is designing an instrument for it. *rock*

We need as many telescopes and instruments as we can keep running. No ground-based telescope can do a 10^6 second integration (see Hubble deep field and ultra deep field). The US is getting its ass kicked by the Euros because we won't spend money on science.

Here is the astronomical observatory (http://www.iac.es/gabinete/orm/indice.html) on La Palma:
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?ll=28.760244,-17.878 962&spn=0.007542,0.007274&t=k&hl=en
(I've observed at several of those small white buildings)

The limitation of a liquid mirror is that it only points straight up, so it's not like a standard telescope that can be pointed in any direction and track objects in the sky. It only looks at the area of sky that is directly overhead.

Also, LMTs don't need expensive mounts, supports, tracking systems, or a dome.

Since any circular section of the parabolic dish would itself be a smaller parabolic dish you could just use a smaller secondary mirror and tilt it to shift the prime focus to any point you wish (within limits). The cost of observing further and farther from the optimum focal point of "straight up" would be in having to use smaller and smaller secondary mirrors and therefore making less magnified observations.

Of course the increased complexity of the system would be a drawback in and of itself but I have to believe it would be worth it. The deep field images would not be endangered since any size secondary could be used right up to the optimum size to take advantage of the entire primary mirror.

I disagree:

http://webcam.magic.iac.es/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi

So you'd better watch out...if you don't play nice, we'll take the Rockies down

Hah, if you do that, then we'll blow La Palma and watch the US east coast disappear under a tsunami over half a kilometre tall! In fact, we don't need to blow it; according to this article, the collapse of La Palma becomes more likely as global temperatures rise.

However, there's no cause for panic. I have a friend working at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, and he's promised to phone me if La Palma collapses. I'll post to Slashdot as soon as I get word...

Doesn't anyone know how to use Google?

Sure I do, but a search for something like "build your own laptop" yields a few guys who will, within quite narrow limitations, let you pick from a few configuration options, which usually do NOT include no OS.

EmperorLinux.com looks like about the best. They resell Sony's big 16" PCG-GRX600, calling it a "Gazelle", and they give you your choice of distro, as long as your choice is RedHat, Mandrake, or Slackware. Beyond that they're hardly "build your own". Minimum CPU is still 1800MHz P4, and there's still that lose"modem". If you want a 60G disk you have to get the 2G CPU which pushes the total to $3000, and I don't even see an option to add extra RAM.

Again, that's not what /me (and I believe others here as well) describe as "build your own".

As you can read, as far as 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope imaged a brown dwarf orbiting a brown dwarf on Gliese 229B. Indeed, some of the US media call it "the first discovered brown-dwarf" although the discoverer was Rafael Rebolo et al at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (he and his colleagues proposed the "Lithium test" method to actually detect this substellar objetcts). You can read a short report about brown dwarf findings at American Scientist.

A new "tep"?

10-meter telescope in the Canary Islands. When it comes online, it too will be hooked to Internet2.

Oh, that's really great! I've been at that site three times (the NOT), and the net connection from the mountain is really bad. It sure needs a lot of improvement. I know they've had some tests where the NOT has been remotely controlled, but it is not for mainstream use. The problem is that you sometimes need to download the picture at once after readout to decide what you should do for the next exposure, but on a slow connection, you will waste a lot of very valuable observing time waiting for an image to download. A typical image is 2048x2048 pixels, 16 bits, pluss header information. Hope we get a bit of that bandwidth the GTC is getting... :-) I've been on the construction site when it was just being dug out.

10-meter telescope in the Canary Islands. When it comes online, it too will be hooked to Internet2.

Oh, that's really great! I've been at that site three times (the NOT), and the net connection from the mountain is really bad. It sure needs a lot of improvement. I know they've had some tests where the NOT has been remotely controlled, but it is not for mainstream use. The problem is that you sometimes need to download the picture at once after readout to decide what you should do for the next exposure, but on a slow connection, you will waste a lot of very valuable observing time waiting for an image to download. A typical image is 2048x2048 pixels, 16 bits, pluss header information. Hope we get a bit of that bandwidth the GTC is getting... :-) I've been on the construction site when it was just being dug out.

Funny, I have observing time at the Nordic Optical Telescope during the named period, they'd better get that thing down properly so it won't disturb my observations.... :-)

Here are links to this story around the Internet:

Hubble and Chandra imaged the comet in early July and saw a house sized chunk come off the comet:
NASA Press Release

A British telescope imaged the comet in late July as it completely vapourized:
Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes Press Release

Finally, here are links to the CNN article, and everywhere else on the Internet I could find:
Astronomy Now
CNN Space
Space Online

And, of course, my own coverage on Universe Today.

Fraser Cain

I had another attempt after getting some coordinates in January this year as well, but failed to find anything.

Bye, CGRO, you've been a great instrument.