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Las Campanas Observatory
Las Campanas Observatory (LCO) is an astronomy, astronomical observatory managed by the Carnegie Institution for Science (CIS). Located in Chile's Atacama Region, it sits about northeast of the city of La Serena, Chile, La Serena. The LCO's telescopes and facilities are positioned near the northern end of a Ridge, mountain ridge. Cerro Las Campanas, situated near the southern end of this ridge and standing over tall, will be the future site of the Giant Magellan Telescope. Established in 1969, LCO is CIS's primary observatory, having taken over this role from Mount Wilson Observatory due to increasing light pollution in the Los Angeles area. The headquarters of Carnegie Observatories is in Pasadena, California, while the main office in Chile is in La Serena, close to the University of La Serena and near the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy facility. The observatory is served by Pelicano Airport, located to the southwest. Telescopes * The Magellan Telesc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Astronomy
Astronomy is a natural science that studies celestial objects and the phenomena that occur in the cosmos. It uses mathematics, physics, and chemistry in order to explain their origin and their overall evolution. Objects of interest include planets, natural satellite, moons, stars, nebulae, galaxy, galaxies, meteoroids, asteroids, and comets. Relevant phenomena include supernova explosions, gamma ray bursts, quasars, blazars, pulsars, and cosmic microwave background radiation. More generally, astronomy studies everything that originates beyond atmosphere of Earth, Earth's atmosphere. Cosmology is a branch of astronomy that studies the universe as a whole. Astronomy is one of the oldest natural sciences. The early civilizations in recorded history made methodical observations of the night sky. These include the Egyptian astronomy, Egyptians, Babylonian astronomy, Babylonians, Greek astronomy, Greeks, Indian astronomy, Indians, Chinese astronomy, Chinese, Maya civilization, M ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Irénée Du Pont
Irénée du Pont I (December 21, 1876 – December 19, 1963) was an American businessman, president of the DuPont company, and head of the Du Pont trust. Early life and education Irénée du Pont I was born on December 21, 1876, in New Castle, Delaware, the son of Mary Belin and Lammot du Pont I, and a descendant of DuPont founder Éleuthère Irénée du Pont. When he was eight years old, his father was killed in an explosion at the DuPont works in Repauno, New Jersey. He graduated from the William Penn Charter School in 1892 before attending Phillips Academy for a year, graduating in 1894, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1897. He received his master's degree in chemical engineering from MIT a year after graduation. While at MIT, he was a member of the Phi Beta Epsilon fraternity. Career He worked for Fenn's Manufacturing Contracting Company for a number of years before he joined DuPont in 1903. du Pont first worked in the organization of a constructi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Takahashi Seisakusho
is a Japanese manufacturer of telescopes and related equipment (such as eyepieces and equatorial mounts) founded in 1932 by Kitaro Takahashi in Tokyo. Originally started as a foundry, Takahashi began manufacturing optical equipment after WWII in 1946. Often known simply as 'Tak', the brand is especially noted amongst amateur astronomers for its range of apochromatic refractors, but also produces various types of Reflecting telescope, reflectors, and instruments featuring compound optics. All Takahashi telescopes and mounts are made in Japan using traditional manufacturing methods, such as sand casting, with nearly all parts made in-house. Takahashi pioneered the use of fluorite crystal in place of one of the glass elements in the objective lens of an astronomical telescope, although this material had previously been used in other optical devices. The company's name would become synonymous with the use of this type of crystal. In recent years however, Takahashi has produced som ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Methods Of Detecting Extrasolar Planets
Methods of detecting exoplanets usually rely on indirect strategies – that is, they do not directly image the planet but deduce its existence from another signal. Any planet is an extremely faint light source compared to its parent star. For example, a star like the Sun is about a billion times as bright as the reflected light from any of the planets orbiting it. In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of detecting such a faint light source, the glare from the parent star washes it out. For those reasons, very few of the exoplanets reported have been detected directly, with even fewer being resolved from their host star. Established detection methods The following methods have proven successful at least once for discovering a new planet or detecting an already discovered planet: Radial velocity A star with a planet will move in its own small orbit in response to the planet's gravity. This leads to variations in the speed with which the star moves toward or away from Ea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Exoplanet
An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System. The first confirmed detection of an exoplanet was in 1992 around a pulsar, and the first detection around a main-sequence star was in 1995. A different planet, first detected in 1988, was confirmed in 2003. In 2016, it was recognized that the first possible evidence of an exoplanet had been noted in 1917. In collaboration with ground-based and other space-based observatories the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to give more insight into exoplanet traits, such as their composition, environmental conditions, and potential for life. There are many methods of detecting exoplanets. Transit photometry and Doppler spectroscopy have found the most, but these methods suffer from a clear observational bias favoring the detection of planets near the star; thus, 85% of the exoplanets detected are inside the tidal locking zone. In several cases, multiple planets have been observed around a star ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
HATNet Project
The Hungarian Automated Telescope Network (HATNet) project is a network of six small fully automated "HAT" telescopes. The scientific goal of the project is to detect and characterize extrasolar planets using the transit method. This network is used also to find and follow bright variable stars. The network is maintained by the Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian. The HAT acronym stands for ''Hungarian-made Automated Telescope'', because it was developed by a small group of Hungarians who met through the Hungarian Astronomical Association. The project started in 1999 and has been fully operational since May 2001. Equipment The prototype instrument, HAT-1 was built from a 180 mm focal length and 65 mm aperture Nikon telephoto lens and a Kodak KAF-0401E chip of 512 × 768, 9 μm pixels. The test period was from 2000 to 2001 at the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest. HAT-1 was transported from Budapest to the Steward Observatory, Kitt Peak, Arizona, USA, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Variable Stars
A variable star is a star whose brightness as seen from Earth (its apparent magnitude) changes systematically with time. This variation may be caused by a change in emitted light or by something partly blocking the light, so variable stars are classified as either: * ''Intrinsic variables'', whose luminosity actually changes periodically; for example, because the star swells and shrinks. * ''Extrinsic variables'', whose apparent changes in brightness are due to changes in the amount of their light that can reach Earth; for example, because the star Eclipsing binaries, has an orbiting companion that sometimes eclipses it. Many, possibly most, stars exhibit at least some oscillation in luminosity: the energy output of the Sun, for example, varies by about 0.1% over an 11-year solar cycle. Discovery An ancient Egyptian calendar of lucky and unlucky days composed some 3,200 years ago may be the oldest preserved historical document of the discovery of a variable star, the eclipsin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
All Sky Automated Survey
The All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) is a Polish project implemented on 7 April 1997 to do photometric monitoring of approximately 20 million stars brighter than 14 magnitude all over the sky. The automatic telescopes discovered two new comets in 2004 and 2006. The ASAS-South, located in Chile and ASAS-North, located in Hawai'i, are managed by Grzegorz Pojmański of the Warsaw University Observatory via the internet. The idea was initiated by the Polish astronomy Professor Bohdan Paczyński of Princeton University. The prototype instrument and data pipeline were designed and built by Grzegorz Pojmański. The work on the ASAS program began in 1996 with a mere $1 million budget. The automatic telescope, located in Las Campanas Observatory, Chile, was designed to register the brightness of circa one million stars in the Southern Hemisphere. However, it proved very efficient and helped to find many new variable stars. The project was then expanded, and now operates four telescopes l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DFM Engineering
DFM Engineering is an American telescope and optics manufacturer founded in 1979 by Frank Melsheimer in Longmont, Colorado, following the successful construction of a then-novel 36-inch telescope for the Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy. DFM makes medium size Cassegrain telescopes and their associated systems including telescope optics, control systems, and mounts. A range of pre-designed telescopes are made, as are various custom installations. DFM produces its classical Cassegrain design in various apertures from 16 inches (0.4 m) to 50 inches (1.3 m) and larger. The base DFM 16-inch (40 cm) telescope system cost roughly 94 thousand USD in 2005. DFM produced a 1.6 m solar telescope for the Big Bear Solar Observatory. The United States Navy purchased a 1.3 m (51-inch) DFM telescope for the United States Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station in Arizona, USA. DFM installations include many universities and institutions, including: Alfred ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Of Warsaw
The University of Warsaw (, ) is a public university, public research university in Warsaw, Poland. Established on November 19, 1816, it is the largest institution of higher learning in the country, offering 37 different fields of study as well as 100 specializations in humanities, Engineering, technical, and natural sciences. The University of Warsaw consists of 126 buildings and educational complexes with over 18 faculties: biology, chemistry, medicine, journalism, political science, philosophy, sociology, physics, geography, regional studies, geology, history, applied linguistics, philology, Polish language, pedagogy, economics, law, public administration, psychology, applied social sciences, management, mathematics, computer science, and mechanics. Among the university's notable alumni are heads of state, prime ministers, Nobel Prize laureates, including Joseph Rotblat, Sir Joseph Rotblat and Olga Tokarczuk, as well as several historically important individuals in their res ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment
The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) is a Polish astronomy, astronomical project based at the University of Warsaw that runs time-domain astronomy, a long-term variability sky survey (1992–present). The main goals are the detection and classification of variable stars (Pulsating variable, pulsating and Eclipsing variable stars, eclipsing), discovery of microlensing events, dwarf novae, and studies of the structure of the Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds. Since the project began in 1992, it has discovered a multitude of extrasolar planets, together with the first planet discovered using the transit method (OGLE-TR-56b) and Methods of detecting exoplanets#Gravitational microlensing, gravitational microlensing. The project has been led by professor Andrzej Udalski since its inception. Description The main targets of the experiment are the Magellanic Clouds and the Galactic Bulge, because of the large number of intervening stars that can be used for microlensing du ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Henrietta Hill Swope
Henrietta Hill Swope (October 26, 1902 – November 24, 1980) was an American astronomer who studied variable stars. In particular, she measured the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid stars, which are bright variable stars whose periods of variability relate directly to their intrinsic luminosities. Their measured periods can therefore be related to their distances and used to measure the size of the Milky Way and distances to other galaxies. Personal life She was the daughter of Mary Hill and Gerard Swope, and niece of Herbert Bayard Swope. Both of her parents taught at Hull-House in Chicago in the late 1890s, where they met. Her father had attended MIT and was an engineer. He worked for General Electric, eventually rising to be president of the company in 1922 and enabling his daughter to be independently wealthy throughout her life. She learned of talks at Maria Mitchell Observatory while vacationing with her family on Nantucket, and took an evening class there alongsi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
