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Over in the west-northwest sky at dusk, Mars and Saturn remain a lovely sight in close proximity to the bright bluish star, Regulus in Leo. Meanwhile, emerging into view low in the southeast you’ll note a very bright silvery “star.” That star however, is the planet identified with the supreme sky-god: Jupiter.

And the smallest telescope — even steadily held 7-power binoculars — will reveal Jupiter's four largest satellites, each of which is equal to or larger than our Moon. The moons are a telescopic treasure. The four…

Scientists are using the giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to go prospecting in a rich molecular cloud in our Milky Way Galaxy. They seek to discover new, complex molecules in interstellar space that may be precursors to life. The GBT and Molecules The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope and some molecules it has discovered. CREDIT: B

“Clouds like this one are the raw material for new stars and planets. We know that complex chemistry builds prebiotic molecules in such clouds long before the stars and planets are formed. There is a good chance that some of these…

Observations from multiple instruments and even multiple telescopes were pooled together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. This week’s cosmic pictures serve to show what can happen when telescopes team up. The good stuff included a wide shot of starbirth in our home galaxy, a second look at a supernova’s

To get the full lineups for the Spitzer teams, check out the GLIMPSE and MIPSGAL Web sites. The team behind the Chandra W28 study includes Jonathan Keohane (Hampden-Sydney College), Jeonghee Rho (Spitzer Science Center), Thomas…

The WorldWide Telescope allows anyone to see stars and planets thousands of light-years away.

The inspiration for the WorldWide Telescope, and much of the early work, came from Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist who disappeared last year while sailing alone off northern California. Mr. Gray had long been intrigued by the computing…

Microsoft has launched WorldWide Telescope, a free tool that stitches together images from some of the best ground- and space-based telescopes.(+Download Link)

"I see the WorldWide Telescope as having an important educational mission," said Robert Kirshner, professor of astronomy at Harvard University. "[It] gives somebody a kind of freedom to follow their…

The 9-year mission of NASAs Compton Gamma Ray Observatory ended in 2000 with a plunge into the Pacific Ocean. But its spare parts are living on ? as a detector of dirty bombs.

Many commercial gamma-ray detectors, however, cant detect the direction of a source. Directionality is particularly useful, for example, if scanning rows of shipping containers rather than single trucks at border crossings, or when tracking…

Astrophysicists have a new window into the formation of planets. Ben R. Oppenheimer, Assistant Curator in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History, and colleagues have imaged a structure within the disk of material coalescing from the gas and dust cloud surrounding a well-studied star, AB Aurigae.

Oppenheimer and his colleagues circumvented this glare by attaching a coronagraph to a unique U.S. Air Force telescope on Maui, Hawaii. The telescope compensates for turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere, permitting extremely high image…