daily telescope

Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

In the 1800s, astronomers were mystified by the discovery of stars that displayed highly unusual emission lines. It was only after 1868, when scientists discovered the element helium, that astronomers were able to explain the broad emission bands due to the presence of helium in these stars.

Over time, these stars became known as Wolf-Rayet stars (Charles Wolf was a French astronomer, and helium was first detected by the French scientist Georges Rayet and others), and astronomers came to understand that they were the central stars within planetary nebulae, and continually ejecting gas at high velocity.

This gives Wolf-Rayet stars a distinctive appearance in the night sky. And this week, Chris McGrew has shared a photo of WR 134—a variable Wolf-Rayet star about 6,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus—which he captured from a dark sky location in southwestern New Mexico.

“The stellar winds are blowing out the blue shell of ionized oxygen gas visible in the middle of the image,” McGrew said. “This is a deep sky object that has been imaged countless times, and I get why. Ever since I saw it for the first time, it’s been high on my list. For years I didn’t have the skies or the time, but I finally got the chance to go after it.”

Source: Chris McGrew

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Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

I did not expect to feature NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers in the Tuesday Telescope so soon, but a recent photo she shared is just sublime. (In case you missed it, we wrote about her photo of lightning from space about a month ago.)

This week Ayers has a time-lapse sequence she captured from the Cupola as the International Space Station soared near Central and South America.

“Soooooo much going on in this picture,” Ayers wrote on the social media site X. “You can see Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, with South America off in the distance.”

The most distinct feature is a lightning strike near Panama City. This illuminates the clouds below. Above the strike is a reddish phenomenon known as a sprite, which sometimes occurs in the atmosphere between 50 and 90 km above a lightning strike near the surface of the planet. This appears to be a “jellyfish” sprite. It is rendered beautifully.

But wait, there’s more! The lightning strike is so bright that its reflection can be seen in the space station’s structure, at the top of the image. Additionally the atmosphere’s airglow can be clearly seen in the orange line just above the atmosphere.

All in all, it’s a wonderful photo, and I can’t wait to see what other treasures Ayers sends down from on high.

Source: Nichole Ayers/NASA

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

This week’s Tuesday Telescope photo is pretty meta as it features… a telescope.

This particular telescope is under construction in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, one of the darkest places on Earth with excellent atmospheric visibility. The so-called “Extremely Large Telescope” is being built on a mountaintop in the Andes at an elevation of about 3,000 meters.

And it really is extremely large. The primary mirror will be 39 meters (128 feet) in diameter. Like, that’s gigantic for an optical telescope. It is nearly four times larger than the largest operational reflecting telescopes in the world.

The Europeans are in a contest, of sorts, with other very large telescope construction projects. A consortium of several countries, including the United States, is building the Giant Magellan Telescope, which will have a primary diameter of 25.4 meters. This facility is also located in the Atacama Desert. Both facilities are targeting first light before the end of this decade, but this will depend on funding and how smoothly construction proceeds. A third large project, the Thirty Meter Telescope, is planned for Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. However, this effort has stalled due to ongoing opposition from native Hawaiians. It is unclear when, or if, it will proceed.

In any case, within less than a decade, we are going to undergo a radical revolution in how we see the cosmos when one or more of these next-generation ground-based optical telescopes come online. What will we ultimately observe?

The mystery of what’s up there left to be discovered is half the fun!

Source: European Southern Observatory

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope?  Reach out and say hello.

Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Most astronauts these days are fairly anonymous, and chances are you have never heard of Nichole Ayers. And that’s OK.

But sometimes it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on just how accomplished these people are. Ayers, 36, flew the supersonic F-22 stealth aircraft in the international war against the Islamic State and rose to become a major in the US Air Force before being selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021. Oh, yeah, she also completed a master’s degree in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University.

For her first spaceflight, Ayers launched on the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station in March. This flight got a fair amount of media attention, but that was largely because the arrival of Crew-10 allowed the Crew Dragon spacecraft to which Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were assigned to return home. Since then, Ayers has spent 50 days in space, astronauting. This included a spacewalk last week, her first, alongside veteran astronaut Anne McClain.

As they returned to the airlock, the Earth below started to put on a lightning show, and Ayers took note, mesmerized. A day later, she picked up a camera and captured some additional lightning strikes, saying, “I am so amazed by the view we have up here of our Earth’s weather systems.” I’ve chosen my favorite of these photos for today’s post.

Source: Nichole Ayers/NASA

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope?  Reach out and say hello.

Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Was the James Webb Space Telescope worth it?

Well, $10 billion is a lot of money. Even when spread over a couple of decades, that’s still a huge chunk of NASA’s annual science budget. (And given the recent Trump administration attack on NASA’s science budget, money is about to get a whole lot tighter.)

However, it is difficult to put a price on advancing our species’ understanding of the natural world and the wide Universe we’re swimming in. And Webb is doing an amazing job of that.

In 2009, NASA launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mission to make infrared observations. This was the latest in a line of space-based infrared observatories, and it cost about 3 percent as much as the Webb telescope.

Today’s photo concerns the planetary nebula NGC 1514. In 2010, using the WISE telescope, NASA project scientist Mike Ressler discovered “rings” around the planetary nebula. Now, thanks to Webb, the rings—which are likely composed of small dust grains, heated by ultraviolet light from a white dwarf star—can be seen clearly. And, oh my, they’re spectacular.

The clarity in the Webb photo, compared to what came before, is remarkable. So, is seeing the Universe in a new light worth $10 billion? I certainly think so, but I’m writing a weekly story called the Tuesday Telescope, so it’s safe to say I am biased.

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Michael Ressler (NASA-JPL), Dave Jones (IAC)

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.