planets

Astrophotography is hard. Astronomically hard. Everything has to be perfect. Your telescope, with camera attached, must track your target in precise synchronization with the rotation of the Earth. It can't shake. It can't even vibrate. You have to nail your camera's exposure settings or you'll be rewarded with an incoherent mess. Your targets are often so dim you can't even see them until after the image has been made, so focusing is a nightmare.

So why try? Because it makes the entities floating in the vastness of the universe much more real than any Hubble wallpaper on your computer desktop can.

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NASA’s Messenger spacecraft recently made its third flyby of Mercury, in order to get a gravity boost that will enable it to enter into orbit around Mercury in 2011. Scientists used the close encounter to capture images of Mercury's surface that had never been seen before.

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Humans tend to imagine things we don't fully understand in our own image: for instance, we anthropomorphize God, most sci-fi movie aliens are some variation of a biped with two eyes, a nose and a mouth, and every planet Captain Kirk visits has an atmosphere just ripe for human respiration. But science tells us things are rarely so neat and tidy out in the great unknown, and just to prove how weird things can be out there, scientists at Washington University St.

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The sun might seem like a pretty huge galactic blind spot, but we've already managed to glimpse behind it, and there's nothing there in the way of another Earth, says NASA scientist Michael Kaiser, "unless it's awfully tiny."

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The 14-year-long summer on Saturn’s southern side is drawing to a close. August 11, 2009, marks the planet’s vernal equinox, when Saturn’s thin rings line up edge-on with the sun. As this happens, the rings will appear to grow thinner until they completely vanish. Because scattered sunlight won’t obscure the view, it’s a perfect time for NASA’s spacecraft Cassini to answer long-standing questions about Saturn.

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At this moment, in the constellation Taurus, a planet is forming in the dust and debris surrounding the star HL Tau. The protoplanet, named HL Tau b, may be the youngest yet discovered.

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When it launches in 2009, NASA's Kepler Mission will include the most sensitive detection system ever put into service for discovering exosolar planets. In the meantime, our toolkit on Earth is getting better with each passing year. Astronomers using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at La Silla Observatory in Chile have discovered three new rocky planets orbiting a single star, all within ten times the size of Earth.

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