It's been a while since we last heard of the ISERV Pathfinder, an imaging instrument that consists of a camera, telescope and pointing system that was sent up to the International Space Station last July.
Over the next two months, astronomers on the mountain will be testing the Dark Energy Camera and tuning the system that comprises the telescope plus the camera.
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The new image, which scientists revealed on Wednesday (Jan. 9), was obtained on the night of Dec. 28 using a new adaptive optics system at the Gemini Observatory South telescope in Chile.
It's taken more than six years of development, but a new imaging system for the Palomar Observatory's 200-inch Hale Telescope finally started capturing images last month, and promises to aid significantly in the search for planets outside our solar system (otherwise known as exoplanets).
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Now, an international team of astronomers has trained the Fermi space-based gamma ray telescope on V407 Cygni, a "binary" system comprising a white dwarf star and a red giant companion, 9, 000 light-years away.
By casting a wide net, the telescope is expected to catch many moving objects within our Solar System.
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To say the telescope helped usher in a new age of astronomy based on the system of Copernicus would be an understatement.
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Even though the suite of instruments for the E-ELT has yet to be finalized, ESO astronomer Joe Liske says the telescope will make observing time for cosmology, nearby galaxies, solar system studies and the burgeoning list of planets now known to circle other stars.
The 1.8m (60-inch) diameter telescope on Haleakala will also spot many small, faint bodies in the outer Solar System that hid from previous surveys.
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Astronomers using the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii discovered the four star pairs, each of which is a binary system in which two stars circle each other in less than four hours.
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This has been achieved with the aid of a cooling system run on superfluid helium, more than 2, 000 litres of which were loaded into the telescope at launch.
In 1609, Italian philosopher and physicist Galileo Galilei used descriptions of Lippershey's gadget to build his own telescope, and with it he was able to observe the Earth, the Moon and several planets in our solar system in detail for the first time.
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