http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1244686/Amateur-star-gazer-captures-astonishing-images-Milky-Way-hole-roof-garden-shed.html

His photographs show a vivid variety of star clusters light years from Earth and have been compared favourably with the images taken from the £2.5billion Hubble telescope.

...and if you look down in the comments in the article his wife makes a comment.

Oh what a proud wife i am!!!!! and no your not getting a bigger telescope.
- LISA SHAH, POWYS, 21/1/2010 6:12

http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2009-04/top-10-telescopes-all-time

Cool list.

Hubble Directly Observes Planet Orbiting Fomalhaut

I can't help but wonder what the astronomers peering over these pictures did when they spotted the planet.  Can you imagine the chills they must have felt when they spotted the planet?  Did they leap up and "WHOOP?"  Or were they more sedate?

This is a remarkable achievement and has occurred sooner than predicted.

• The Futurist: Finding Earth-like Planets Will Soon be Possible
• techRivet: Planet Hunting, The Next Generation - The Lyot Project

Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

That's a planet you're looking at 25 light years away.  Now that's cool.

News article: Hubble Telescope captures first image of alien planet seen with visible light

Go Download It!

Just so you know, you need a beefy machine.

But OMG is it cool.  I'll play with it over the next day or two and let you all know what I think.  But here are some brief observations.

1. it's REAL time.  The planets move.

2. It's very very smooth.

3. The UI is incredibly intuitive. 

Here is a little guided tour for you of a simple zoom in to Saturn.  We start out fully zoomed out and looking at the constellation Leo in the center.

In we go, we see Regulus come into focus, one of the key stars of Leo.  37 Leonis is the second brightest in the middle top third of the picture.

Further in still too close now and Regulus has moved off the screen.  37 Leonis is just out of the picture above the center.

And now you can make out Saturn finally.

And there she is.

This little experience in and of itself was enjoyable.  This makes me want to go out and buy a machine for this software only.

This is a compelling reason to upgrade your system.

SEE not infer.

The technology does not use glass lenses nor reflective mirrors but an advanced form of a pinhole camera, the "pinhole" technique is called Fresnel zone plates.

New Scientist article.

The technical hurdles would be tricky but nothing unbelievable.

Essentially we would need to launch two spacecraft.: one is the "lens" and one is the "receptor".  The focal point using the Fresnel method is kilometers away from the lense, ergo the two spacecraft solution.

Go read the whole article, just fascinating.

Feeds right into this post: Planet Hunting, The Next Generation - The Lyot Project

That's German for "counter glow".

On the darkest nights, 180 degrees around from the sun there is a reflection of light from the sun called the Gegenschein.  This is a reflection of light off of dust particles in the asteroid belt. 

Check it out. 

The black part in the middle of the picture is the Pipe Nebula.  It is not a dark window into the background, but a foreground BLACK cloud of dust.

Info here: panther observatory

Accelerating change is going on all around us.  We see it in entertainment from computer games to movies.  We see it in telephones as they keep getting smaller and more feature rich.  We see it in cameras and music players and personal GPS devices.  Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

All of this creeps into our lives and becomes ubiquitous.  The changes quickly becomes invisible, expected and, in a weird sort of way, un-important.

But accelerating change is also affecting the sciences.

For example the hunt for extra-solar planets.  The first one discovered was in 1991.  Since then there has been a rapid pace of discovery.  The bulk of the discoveries essentially done by inference: careful detection of the wobbling of the star around which the planet[s] orbit. 

So the point here is that before 1991 we had NO evidence of planets orbiting other stars.  In theory we were 100% sure (or so close as to make no difference) that most stars had some planets, but we had no direct evidence.

Now there has been over 250 planets identified.

But wait that's not all!

Now there is a new technology under development by the Lyot Project, it's goal to create the necessary instrument and associated software to remove starlight from images thus allowing the much fainter planets to be viewed directly.  Astronomers will no longer need rely on inference to discover new planets.

This would be a remarkable achievement and would allow for a much greater number of planets to be discovered.  It would probably also allow for the discovery of Earth like planets and the reading of spectrums from the planets themselves.

What would the reactions be if we found a planet with a spectral analysis that matched Earth?  Orbit, temperature, water, oxygen?...

Would that spur some research into a viable star probe?  Just asking...

Accelerating change is cool.

Sites of interest:

• Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia
• How do astronomers find planets orbiting other stars?
• The Futurist is a big proponent of observing the accelerating change going on in many facets of our world and even in places we don't normally look. There are several entries that discuss the accelerating change that is going on in telescope technology.