Current events in astronomy

Astronomy can be like a professional sport.  A lot of people like to keep up with it on a day to day basis.  There’s breaking news every day.  That includes new images brought in from satellites and telescopes, new discoveries about the nature of planets and stars and other objects, as well as breakthroughs and just every day small progress in the tools and techniques used to make these discoveries.

NASA’s  website contains a lot of this information.  NASA stays on top of all the latest events, and even makes a lot of the news itself.  In November of 2008, NASA listed these events.

One of the most vital 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 are not just spacewalks they are also learning experiences that apply to future missions.  While some might argue that the space station is more space related than necessarily astronomy related, there is a lot of science going on there, including observations of outer space which certainly falls under the heading of astronomy.

And incredible discovery by the Hubble telescope is another one of the current events in astronomy.  For the first time, a planet was seen orbiting another star in the visible light spectrum. Back in the early 1980s an infrared telescope called IRAS saw 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 small planet.

Current and events in astronomy can also be about what happened a long time ago.  The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project is set to restore images taken of the moon by Lunar Orbiter spacecraft in 1966 and 1967.  This data was taken from tape drives.  NASA  has already released some of these restored historic images.  

Astronomy is as huge as the universe it covers.  Current events in astronomy could cover volumes each day.   Always looked to the sky!

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