Anyone who has felt inspired to photograph a particularly stunning harvest moon, sun dog or other astronomical event knows that capturing these moments requires skill and good equipment. Earlier this spring, the Division of Mathematics and Natural Sciences celebrated the purchase of a new 11-inch Celestron telescope and Canon DSLR for use in astronomy courses.

The new equipment will allow students to photograph objects in deep space, including those that are barely visible through the scope.

Professor Ray Myers explained, “This scope has a database of 10,000 objects, which its computer can track and direct the scope to find for observation and photography. It also has a guide scope system which refines the tracking so that long exposures can be taken, allowing for photography of deep space objects.”

Greenville College students have already begun taking sophisticated photos of the universe. This summer, Elle Shaw and Peter Huston worked with Myers to learn how to set up and operate the equipment during the Greenville College Summer Research Experience (GC-SRE). They took a variety of photos with the equipment.

“Our project mainly consisted of learning how the new telescope operated and it’s capabilities. We spent a lot of time learning about astrophotography, taking pictures with the telescope and brainstorming how we can best utilize the new telescope in the Planets and Stars course,” Shaw said.

Read more about the new telescope.

You can hear Shaw and Huston talk about their project and learn more about the new telescope at Homecoming 2013’s Student Summer Research Symposium.

Via: For the Record:  Greenville College’s e-newsletter http://www.greenville.edu/newsletter/student-summer-research-symposium.html

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun.

New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars. Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our sun are still evident. A report on the analysis of this new data, an effort led by Don Gurnett and the plasma wave science team at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, is published in Thursday’s edition of the journal Science.

“Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind’s historic leap into interstellar space,” said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. “The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we’ve all been asking — ‘Are we there yet?’ Yes, we are.”

Voyager 1 first detected the increased pressure of interstellar space on the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles surrounding the sun that reaches far beyond the outer planets, in 2004. Scientists then ramped up their search for evidence of the spacecraft’s interstellar arrival, knowing the data analysis and interpretation could take months or years.

via NASA Spacecraft Embarks on Historic Journey Into Interstellar Space | NASA.