Telescope

Skip the holiday parties Monday night and head instead to Griffith Observatory for a bash to mark the last lunar eclipse of the decade. OK, there might not be eggnog, but there will be free telescopes to peek through and lectures about the sky event, which organizers say should be remarkable -- if the weather cooperates. The observatory will be open from 8 p.m. Monday to 1:30 a.m. Tuesday with telescopes (not the huge ones) set up for viewing, though the eclipse also will be visible with the naked eye. The "show" will start about 10:30 p.m. as the eclipse begins, and totality will start at 11:41 p.m. Observatory director E.C. Krupp plans to don a wizard costume to "welcome" the moon back to the night sky after the eclipse.

Planet-hunting scientists were dealt a major blow Wednesday when NASA officials announced that a crucial wheel on the Kepler space telescope had ceased to function and that the craft had been placed in safe mode. Even as NASA officials raised the possibility that they could get the telescope back up and running, scientists began mourning the potential loss of a spacecraft that they said had fundamentally altered our understanding of alien planets in the Milky Way - and Earth's place in an increasingly crowded galaxy.

NASA launched a telescope to scout out elusive, super high-energy gamma rays lurking in the universe. GLAST -- a NASA acronym for Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope -- began its 5- to 10-year mission with a midday blastoff aboard a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral. Everything went well and, in just over an hour, the telescope was orbiting 345 miles above Earth as planned.

Einstein was right about relativity, again. NASA's Kepler space telescope has beamed back the latest evidence that light can be bent by gravity, an element of the theory of general relativity. It's not that astrophysicists expect observations to contradict Albert. But the findings represent the first time the phenomenon has been detected in a binary star system, according to NASA. In this case, a dead star, known as a white dwarf, bent the light from its partner, a small “red dwarf.”  The density of the much smaller white dwarf is far greater than that of its partner.

Astronomers opened a new window to the cosmos by inaugurating a powerful U.S.-Brazilian telescope under northern Chile's famously clear skies. The $30-million Southern Astrophysical Research, or SOAR, telescope sits at 8,800 feet on Cerro Pachon mountain, 300 miles north of Santiago, the capital. Builders broke ground on the telescope project six years ago. It was financed by the U.S.

One of the world's most powerful telescopes opened its shutters in the Canary Islands to begin exploring faint light from distant parts of the universe. The Gran Telescopio Canarias, a $185-million telescope featuring a 34-foot reflecting mirror, sits atop an extinct volcano. Its perch above cloud cover takes advantage of the pristine skies over the Atlantic Ocean. The observatory is at 7,870 feet above sea level where prevailing winds keep the atmosphere stable and transparent, the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute said.

Satellites, planets and other celestial bodies will be more than pictures in a textbook for students at La Jolla Country Day School. Thursday night the private school unveiled the newest addition to its exclusive campus--an observatory equipped with a 16-inch telescope. The school is one of only an estimated 10 primary or secondary schools--public and private--in the state to have such facilities. "The number (of secondary schools with observatories) is almost nil.

One night on Mt. Wilson about 1908, a short, powerfully built man with a handlebar mustache looked through the largest telescope in the world. What he saw transformed him, and would put Los Angeles at the forefront of a movement to make astronomy the people's science. We may never know whether Col. Griffith J. Griffith saw the rings of Saturn or another celestial object with the then-new 60-inch reflector telescope, but we can be sure that it inspired his vision of a world-class observatory for the people of Los Angeles, allowing the masses a glimpse of the heavens.

Anywhere on Earth this would be a big telescope, as tall as a seven-story building, with a main mirror measuring 32 1/2 feet across. But here at the South Pole, it seems especially large, looming over a barren plain of ice that gets colder than anywhere else on the planet. Scientists built the instrument at the end of the world so they can search for clues that might identify the most powerful, plentiful but elusive substance in the universe: dark energy. First described just nine years ago, dark energy is a mysterious force so powerful that it will decide the fate of the universe.

The summer sunset has painted a vivid watercolor of orange, coral and violet over the Pacific, just past the pier in Seal Beach. But Michael Beckage already has his telescope trained on the moon. Even in this light, the moon is bright and crystalline, like a salt mine with dimples and ridges. Yet Beckage hardly has a moment to take a peek. Instead, a little girl perches on a stepladder to squint into the eyepiece, a line forming behind her. "Do you see the holes in the moon?" Beckage says, pointing out the craters.

Is it possible to crowdsource an old telescope? The Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., is about to find out. Built by the astronomer Percival Lowell in 1894, the 24-inch Alvan Clark Telescope has been in continuous use for 117 years. About the turn of the 20th century, Lowell used it to study Mars - famously arguing (incorrectly) that “canals” he saw on the planet's surface were evidence of intelligent life. Astronomer V.M. Slipher discovered galactic redshifts there in 1912; the Apollo program used the instrument to prepare for moon missions.

Braving the rain, scientists and engineers have rolled out a full scale model of the NASA James Webb Space Telescope at South by Southwest. The public will get an up-close look at the telescope, which will look deep into the cosmos for starlight from the most distant galaxies to learn about the origins of the universe. "We call ourselves a time machine," said Scott Willoughby, James Webb program manager at Northrop Grumman, where the telescope is being built. "We can look and actually find, further than Hubble did, the first light that came out after the big bang.

One night on Mt. Wilson about 1908, a short, powerfully built man with a handlebar mustache looked through the largest telescope in the world. What he saw transformed him, and would put Los Angeles at the forefront of a movement to make astronomy the people's science. We may never know whether Col. Griffith J. Griffith saw the rings of Saturn or another celestial object with the then-new 60-inch reflector telescope, but we can be sure that it inspired his vision of a world-class observatory for the people of Los Angeles, allowing the masses a glimpse of the heavens.

NASA scientists have discovered a faraway planet that's smaller than Mercury - far tinier than they expected they could find when they launched the Kepler space telescope nearly four years ago. The hot, rocky world orbits a sun-like star that's about 210 light-years from Earth. Astronomers are excited about it because it's smaller than any planet in our solar system, said astrophysicist Thomas Barclay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. "This is the smallest exoplanet that's ever been found," said Barclay, lead author of a report on the discovery published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Astronomers may have to brace for a much humbler astrophysics mission following the planned launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018, a NASA official told a ballroom full of astronomers Tuesday. Under current budget constraints and with future funding uncertain, such a mission might have to be small enough to cost $1 billion or less, NASA astrophysics division director Paul Hertz told astronomers gathered for a town hall at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach.

Grab your telescope. The asteroid known as Toutatis will make its closest approach to Earth tonight. From Tuesday night to Wednesday morning, the 3-mile long asteroid will be about 18 times the distance of the moon from the Earth.  And if you miss it Tuesday night, don't worry. The asteroid should be visible if you have the right conditions, the right telescope and a good star chart -- through the end of the week.  Even at its closest approach you won't be able to see Toutatis with the naked eye. You'll need a small telescope.

A 12-foot, state-of-the-art telescope will be set up at Cypress Nature Park at 8 p.m. Wednesday. Everyone is invited to gaze through the telescope and hear lectures on astronomy. The park is at 4201 Ball Road. Information: (714) 299-7680.

Over the last few weeks, astronomers announced not one but two extraordinary discoveries in the ongoing search for planets orbiting stars beyond the sun. The first was a world about the size of Neptune, 5,000 light-years away, whirling around in a solar system with four stars. It's something like Luke Skywalker's home world of Tatooine in the "Star Wars" movies, except that fictional planet sported only two suns. The second was an Earth-size planet right next door in the Alpha Centauri system - three stars that orbit one another not thousands or hundreds but a mere four light-years from our solar system.

The Hubble Space Telescope has detected light from a small galaxy emitted just 500 million years after the big bang, a crucial and difficult-to-study era when the universe was very young, scientists reported Wednesday. Scientists were able to see the ancient galaxy because gravity from a massive galaxy cluster situated between it and Hubble acted as a lens, bending the light from the "incredibly faint" galaxy and magnifying it about 15 times, said Johns Hopkins astronomer Wei Zheng.