A Different Perspective

The Bad Astronomy Blog gives a top ten list of astronomy images for 2006. There are some really wonderful choices there, and Phil Plait gives a good deal of discussion of each one. The winner is this fantastic back-lit (by the sun, not some giant NASA flashgun) image of Saturn taken -of course- by the Cassini mission:

Back-Lit Saturn by Cassini

Now there’s another wonderful feature of this photo that makes it such a clear winner. […] Click to continue reading this post

Planet Hunter

This is a diagram of the layout of the equipment on the Corot (COnvection, ROtation and planetary Transits) space telescope, launched recently from a site in Kazakhstan:

corot satellite

It’s a European Space Agency (ESA) mission, primarily run by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES – the French Space Agency, if you will) and it’s going to be looking closely at about 120,000 stars for signs of planetary bodies in orbit around them, in addition to studying the stars themselves. There’s a BBC story here, with video, more figured and images, and links to other sites, such as this condensed mission guide. The Proteus platform in the diagram refers to that fact that this is but one of a series of craft in the “Proteus” series, the platform itself being the design of the core containing the instrumentation and control systems of the device. Learn more about that here.

By going over to ESA’s site, you can learn a lot more about the scientific objectives and […] Click to continue reading this post