Learn About Current Events In Astronomy

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Learn About Current Events In Astronomy

Friday, July 31st, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

Astronomy, at times, can be like a sport. It’s fun to watch what’s going on day after day, reading the magazines and web site articles for all the current events in astronomy. There’s breaking news every day. This includes new discoveries in tools and techniques for astronomy, as well as interesting images of all the objects and phenomena in the sky.

A good place to find out about a lot of this is on NASA’s website. NASA both breaks the news and makes the news when it comes to astronomy and space. A quick look at NASA’s web site in mid November revealed some pretty big current events in astronomy.

One of the most important current events in astronomy NASA discussed in November was the late month launch of the shuttle Endeavour. Its mission was to re-supply and repair the International Space Station. This included a number of space walks to perform routine maintenance on the outside of the station. Space walks not only accomplish a purpose, they teach NASA a lot for the future. Space station work includes a lot of astronomy work.

Another astronomy current event discussed by NASA in November was a staggering discovery made by the Hubble Telescope. For the first time in history, a telescope took a visible light image of a planet orbiting another star. The effort dates way back to the 1980’s when NASA’s IRAS, an infrared telescope, discovered dust around the star. That was a tell tale sign that planets might orbit this star located about 25 light years away from our own little planet.

This one, still one of the current events in astronomy, is all about the past. NASA announced details of a Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project designed to restore images of the moon taken by five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that visited the moon in 1966 and 1967. Much of the data was removed from the tape drives in the 1980’s, but stored as analogue images and only partially restored. NASA has already released some of these restored historic images.

Astronomy, like the Universe, is huge. Current events in astronomy could cover volumes each day. Keep watching!

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