Notices by Kelly Lepo (kellylepo@astrodon.social)

JWST's primary mirror is made up of 18 hexagonal, gold-coated segments. A new blog post is out today from the team that keeps the mirror segments perfectly aligned so that they function as one big mirror.

So far, everything is going great. The overall performance of the telescope is far better than expected, and the alignment needs fewer corrections than expected.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2024/11/08/monitoring-webbs-mirrors-for-optimal-optics/

#JWST #NASA #Astronomy

Mahalo to the folks at the ʻImiloa Astronomy Center for inviting a group of us from the STScI to come to the island of Hawai'i to collaborate, and for organizing a trip to the summit of Maunakea and a tour of the Keck observatories. What a special, beautiful, otherworldly place!

Video of the Keck II telescope moving inside of the dome.

The primary mirror is made of 36 1.8-meter-wide hexagonal segments that work together to form one 10-meter-diameter mirror. The Keck telescopes were the first segmented mirrors used in a professional observatory. This design concept was later used for JWST.

Apparently, the Universe has some questions.

#JWST spotted an unusual configuration of a gravitational lens, a hyperbolic umbilic lens. The gravity of a foreground galaxy cluster magnifies and distorts the light from background galaxies.

This cosmic question mark is made of five images of the same background galaxy pair, labeled A-E, an interacting red dusty galaxy and a face-on spiral galaxy. The foreground galaxy cluster is the white hazy ovals.

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2024/news-2024-128

#Space #Astronomy

New JWST poster alert!

Download and print a mini poster featuring an infrared image of the Phantom Galaxy, NGC 628. The back features a description in both English and Spanish.

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/products/01J56VRPSTJNMAC3KASKQQE8SZ

#space #astronomy #Astrodon #JWST

This poster (and all of the images and text produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute) is in the public domain, so you can do whatever you want with it, as long as it's legal. Don't use this poster for crimes 😉

More printable posters are available on WebbTelescope.org

https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/posters

On Monday and Tuesday, ESA's Juice mission performed a lunar-Earth flyby, a double gravity assist maneuver to send it to Venus on its way to Jupiter, its final destination.

The onboard monitoring cameras sent back some really cool images.

And there is more to come! All ten of Juice’s scientific instruments switched on during the Moon flyby, and eight switched on during the Earth flyby. Expect images and spectra from the science instruments in the next few weeks.

More: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice/Juice_rerouted_to_Venus_in_world_s_first_lunar-Earth_flyby

Two years after a cyber attack, ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) re-launched the ALMA mini-site for kids.

I'm glad it's back online. It has lots of great content and activities, available in both English and Spanish, including my favorite electromagnetic spectrum chart.

https://kids.alma.cl/

#Astronomy #Astrodon #ITeachPhysics

Surprisingly, people are sometimes wrong on the internet. There are a lot of mislabeled astronomical images out there.

How can you find images of space from trusted sources? Try AstroPix. It offers access to the public image galleries from leading astronomical observatories under a single unified interface. Search by object name or coordinates, or use the free text to search titles, captions, and topics.

https://www.astropix.org

1/3

Looking for resources to use in astronomy education or outreach? Want to take a deep dive into topics in astrophysics?

NASA’s Universe of Learning has several curated collections of images, videos, activities, and more that focus on specific topics and targets.

Check them out:
https://universe-of-learning.org/informal-educators/science-resources/

#Astronomy #Astrodon #ITeachPhysics

NASA is facing a tough budget situation, which might lead to the end of the Chandra X-ray telescope and big cuts to Hubble :(

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/23/nx-s1-5048828/chandra-x-ray-observatory-nasa-powerful-telescope-anniversary

More on the proposed NASA budget cuts to Chandra and Hubble

https://spacenews.com/review-concludes-proposed-nasa-budget-cuts-would-end-chandra/

This week marks the 30th anniversary of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slamming into Jupiter.

One of my formative childhood memories is eagerly waiting for the comet to hit Jupter and then seeing the #Hubble images after at a public lecture at the local university.

Here is an Illuminated Universe guest post from a few years ago by @spacegeck about reprocessing the Hubble data.

https://illuminateduniverse.org/2020/06/18/guest-post-a-new-take-on-a-comets-impact-for-hubbles-30th/

And here is the final animation @spacegeck, showing the reprocessed images of the pieces of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hitting Jupiter and the resulting scars on the planet's surface.

https://youtu.be/fq4PnAabL3Y?si=TbblLrN8Hl1o9zwF

To celebrate its 2nd year of science, #JWST took this image of Arp 142, a pair of interacting galaxies sometimes called the Penguin and the Egg 🐧🥚.

The Penguin is a spiral galaxy whose shape has been distorted by the gravity of the elliptical Egg galaxy. The two are about 100,000 light-years apart and completed a close pass between 25 and 75 million years ago. They will merge into one galaxy hundreds of millions of years from now.
1/

https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2024/news-2024-124
#space #astronomy #Astrodon

Hubble is back doing science!

Here is one of the first new images #Hubble has taken since transitioning to one-gyro mode and restarting science operations June 14.

It features the lenticular galaxy NGC 1546, a member of the Dorado group of galaxies, about 58 million light years away.

https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2024/news-2024-026

I went on a tour of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center today with a group of students. The highlight was seeing (parts of) the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope being tested in the massive clean room.

From left to right, we see the spacecraft bus (where the computers, communications equipment, and propellent are housed), spare solar panels, and the coronagraph instrument (under the silver tent thing, near the wall of air filters).

It's official, #Hubble has successfully transitioned to one-gyro mode and is back to doing science.

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-restarts-science-in-new-pointing-mode/

Goodbye #AAS244 and #MadisonWI.
I had fun and learned a lot. I also ate a lot of cheese.
See you all at #AAS245!