telescope
Tag archives for telescope
So much more than an Atom Smasher
Posted by Ethan on December 6, 2012 
“Forget it. I didn’t have that thing inside me where I wanted to smash against somebody and watch them break. I was too sensitive for that and disliked being that sensitive.” -Josh Brolin How do you figure out what something is made of? You take it apart — cracking it open if necessary — and…
This is the Universe… but is it art?
Posted by Ethan on August 28, 2012 
“At the last dim horizon, we search among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than history. It is not satisfied and it will not be oppressed.” -Edwin Hubble While new discoveries are made about the Universe, a new explorer finds its way…
Sometimes, Size is Everything!
Posted by Ethan on June 12, 2012 
“I went into a clothing store, and the lady asked me what size I was. I said, ‘Actual’. I’m not to scale.” -Demitri Martin When you look out at the Universe, what you can see is limited, at the most fundamental level, by the size of what you look with. This is why you can…
What Lies in the great Pinwheel Galaxy?
Posted by Ethan on May 26, 2012 
“This seems to be the law of progress in everything we do; it moves along a spiral rather than a perpendicular; we seem to be actually going out of the way, and yet it turns out that we were really moving upward all the time.” -Frances Willard As spring gives way to summer here in…
Late to the Party
Posted by Ethan on April 24, 2008 (Thanks to Starts With A Bang! reader benhead.) The Hubble Space Telescope has released some beautiful images of colliding galaxies in a huge collection! Here are some of my favorites, with my very own names for them (real name in parentheses). We’ll start with the Glowing Arrow (Arp 148): The Highway Windshield (NGC 6240) The…
Telescopes 100 Years Ago: A Story
Posted by Ethan on April 16, 2008 I was doing a little research into the history of telescopes, and it was about a century ago that they finally realized how much more potential light-gathering power reflecting telescopes had as compared to the older refracting telescopes. On Mt. Wilson in California, astronomer George Ellery Hale and optician George Willis Ritchey (back then everybody…
How much better are cameras?
Posted by Ethan on March 24, 2008 Cameras, CCDs, prisms, grisms, etc., are all some of the instruments that can go on top of telescopes to help us see things better. We haven’t really increased the size of telescopes so much as we have the quality and ability of the apparatus that go atop them. Take a look at various pictures I’ve…
