In a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society, images from the Hubble Telescope have revealed a rather odd image of what seems like a "backwards armed" galaxy in the Centaurus constellation. A study was conducted to reveal that the galaxy called NGC4622 did not follow the conventional characteristics of a double-armed spiral galaxy.

Read more about this strange galaxy in the full article!

Back in 1999, Comet Holmes was too small for the Hubble telescope to measure. One night, the comet suddenly brightened over a million-fold in a single day with a debris cloud measuring 1.4 million kilometers, only slightly larger than our own sun. What caused this sudden eruption of dust and light? Unfortunately, Hubble still doesn't have the answers. Check the full article for more details.

 

A new optical system is now giving an audience on earth a view of the great beyond far sharper than even space-based telescopes can offer. Named "Lucky," the new camera system was developed thanks to a collaborative effort between between Cambridge University (UK), and the California Institute of Technology (US).

The Lucky camera uses two methods to achieve its phenomenal clarity. The first is by means of a sensitive light-detection system. At the heart of this is a chip with very little electrical noise, which allows the Lucky camera to see images in greater detail.

The second part of the system is software that allows the camera to work around the leading cause of clarity loss - atmospheric distortions. As Dr. Craig Mackay of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy explained, atmospheric distortions are very much like heat waves on the horizon. Lucky's software allowed the camera a workaround for this problem.

The object is distorted by the haze most of the time. But every now and again there are moments when the haze drops and you can see it very clearly.

Working together, these two systems generated images reportedly double that of the Hubble telescope. A fascinating feat, considering that Hubble isn't hindered by an atmosphere. As with regards to Lucky's limits, Dr. Mackay further said,

The images space telescopes produce are of extremely high quality but they are limited to the size of the telescope. Our techniques can do very well when the telescope is bigger than Hubble and has intrinsically better resolution.

There are currently two published images for the Lucky Camera: One of the Globular cluster M13, and of the Cat's Eye Nebula. The image we posted at the top is of the Cat's Eye Nebula; the image on the right was taken with a Palomar 200-inch camera, while the image on the left was taken with the Lucky camera.

Our big "eye in the sky" is down with another case of sore eyes. The Hubble Telescope had unexpectedly shut down its most frequently used camera, the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The engineers are still investigating the problem, and so far, they've only managed to narrow it down to the High Resolution Channel (HRC).

The HRC is just one of the three channels of the ACS. This channel has the highest resolution, and can take detailed shots of planets and other interstellar objects. The other two channels seem to be working fine, and they noticed that ACS detected zero energy from the HRC.

This is why it had shut down. The weird thing is, unlike that of the malfunction back in June, this one is different. Engineers say that the power supply seems to be working perfectly and that it's the HRC's electronic wiring that is faulty.

The Hubble mission managers and engineers remain hopeful, though, and they're aiming to go back on-air by next week. They don't seem to be too worried about the HRC going offline. Since it's only used 10% of the time, it's not the worst case scenario. They'd just have to use the other instruments and channels in the meantime.

The Hubble Telescope has recently captured images of a rare Uranian solar eclipse. Basically, the planet Uranus and one of its icy moons, Ariel, were aligned in such a way that Ariel was casting a shadow onto the cloud tops of the planet. To an observer standing on Uranus' surface, this would have looked as a solar eclipse with the moon temporarily blocking the sun as it moves across the sky.

Though such occurrences are more common on other gas giants such as Jupiter, the event on Uranus is considered rare because the planet's orientation makes it difficult for an eclipse to happen.

Uranus is basically tilted on its side, unlike the other planets, and its moons orbit the planet above the equator. The satellites' paths aligns edge-on to the sun only every 42 years, when the sun shines directly over the equator. The last time that this phenomenon was observed was back in 1965, but it is only now with our present technology are accurate images available.

Hubble Telescope, Earth's eye in the sky, sighted a star factory in the dusty cores of two merging galaxies 250 million light-years away in the constellation Serpen. A team of researchers from McMaster University in Canada saw more than 200 mammoth star clusters in Arp 220, a super galaxy sired by two galaxies which started merging 700 million years ago.

The star clusters are packed into a region only about 5,000 light-years across - small by endless space standards - with the biggest cluster containing enough matter to produce 10 million suns.  "This is star birth in the extreme," said team member Christine Wilson "This is a nearby look at a phenomenon that was common in the early universe, when many galaxies were merging." Based on their calculations one of the clusters was less than 10 million years old while another was 70 million to 500 million years old.  Scientists say Arp 220 will continue to produce more star clusters until it runs out of gas about 40 million years from now.