Category Archives: News and Updates

News about Astronomy and Space Science. Find every news item and update here, in blog format. You can get these updates sent straight to your mailbox by subscribing here, or you can subscribe to the RSS feed by clicking the link.

Venus with the naked eye in Daylight

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Thanks to some excellent advice from Neville Young, in his new book Astronomy within Reach, we can all amaze and astound our friends by helping them to see the planet Venus with the naked eye, in full daylight.  Regular readers will have already seen photographs showing that such a thing is possible, and should have worked out that Venus is bright enough to show up well against the blue daytime sky.  The problem is that the human eye has an … Continue reading →

Meet the SAAO’s new director

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In January next year, the directorship of the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) will be changing hands.  Current incumbent Professor Phil Charles will be handing the reins over to Professor Ted Williams.  Williams is currently a Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, and has served as director of the department’s Graduate Programme and as associate chair of the department from 2002 to 2005, and again since 2010.  It’s a little early, but we … Continue reading →

Curiosity’s first success

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 The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL, or just “Curiosity” to its friends) is still a few days away from landing on Mars but it has already finished its first experiment:  For the past 252 days, the Radiation Assesment Detection (RAD) experiment has been measuring radiation levels in deep space.  There is a lot of talk about a mission sending people to Mars, but one of the many obstacles is that space is a dangerous place, and human beings are quite vulnerable … Continue reading →

Proving General Relativity with sunlight

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Einstein’s theory of General Relativity is one of the great success stories of modern science.  Few theories have made such extraordinary claims while still shrugging off all challenges with ease.  It seems strange, then, that one of the very first predictions made by the theory should be one of the last to be successfully tested.  The prediction is this:  A gravitational field will distort spacetime in such a way that light passing to a region of lower gravitational potential should … Continue reading →

First light for H.E.S.S II telescope

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Last week, the 28 meter H.E.S.S II cherenkov telescope began operations for the first time.  Built at the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) observatory in Namibia, it is the largest telescope ever built which operates in the gamma ray spectrum.  Gamma ray telescopes are tricky devices, as gamma radiation passes straight through any material that might be used as a focusing lens or mirror.  Even when ways are found to defeat that obstacle, there’s still the problem of Earth’s atmosphere … Continue reading →