Equipment

TS Photoline 60mm f/5.5 apo travel ‘scope

It’s holiday time again and the keen observer is faced with the usual dilemma: how does one carry a telescope small enough to be useful to far-flung dark and exotic skies? Fortunately for globe-trotters concerned about optical size and weight, Telescope Service in Germany has the TSAPO60 — a compact and very versatile photo-visual 60mm f/5.5 ED refractor.

News

Possible exomoon signal found

Strong hints have been found of a possible exomoon candidate orbiting a gas giant planet over 4,000 light years away in the constellation of Cygnus the Swan. Should the moon be confirmed later this year by the Hubble Space Telescope, it will be the first moon ever discovered around a planet beyond our Solar System.

News

A tale of three stellar cities

Using new observations from ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope, astronomers have discovered three different populations of young stars within the Orion Nebula Cluster. This unexpected discovery adds very valuable new insights for the understanding of how such clusters form.

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Galactic David and Goliath

The gravitational dance between two galaxies in our local neighbourhood has led to intriguing visual features in both as witnessed in this new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The tiny NGC 1510 and its colossal neighbour NGC 1512 are at the beginning of a lengthy merger, a crucial process in galaxy evolution.

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Haze on Saturn’s horizon

This false-color view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft gazes toward the rings beyond Saturn’s sunlit horizon. Along the limb at left can be seen a thin, detached haze. This haze vanishes toward the left side of the scene.

News

Gamma-ray burst captured in unprecedented detail

Gamma-ray bursts are among the most energetic and explosive events in the universe. They are also short-lived, lasting from a few milliseconds to about a minute, making it tough for astronomers to observe a gamma-ray burst in detail. Using a wide array of ground- and space-based telescope observations, an international team constructed one of the most detailed descriptions of a gamma-ray burst to date.

News

Scientists spy new evidence of water in the Moon’s interior

A new study of satellite data finds that numerous volcanic deposits distributed across the surface of the Moon contain unusually high amounts of trapped water compared with surrounding terrains. The finding of water in these ancient deposits, which are believed to consist of glass beads formed by the explosive eruption of magma coming from the deep lunar interior, bolsters the idea that the lunar mantle is surprisingly water-rich.