Breakthrough Listen has just announced a new optical SETI effort in partnership with the VERITAS Collaboration. The news took me by surprise, for VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) generally deals in high-energy astrophysics, with a...
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Unusual Lightcurve of a ‘What Is This’ Star
VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) is a near-infrared instrument located at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal site, and is by all accounts the world's largest survey telescope, with extremely wide field of view and sensitive...
Reviving Deep Sky Images from the Past
These days we take in data at such a clip that a mission like New Horizons will generate papers for decades. The same holds true for our burgeoning databanks of astronomical objects observed from the ground. So it only makes sense that we begin to recover older...
Pulsar Navigation: Mining Our Datasets
Science fiction dealt with interstellar navigation issues early on. In fact, Clément Vidal's new paper, discussed in these pages yesterday, notes a George O. Smith story called "Troubled Star," which originally ran in a 1953 issue of Startling Stories and later...
Pulsar Navigation: Exploring an ETI Hypothesis
Pulsar navigation may be our solution to getting around not just the Solar System but the regions beyond it. For millisecond pulsars, a subset of the pulsar population, seem to offer positioning, navigation, and timing data, enabling autonomous navigation for any...
Detection Possibilities for Optical SETI
The Laser SETI campaign we looked at on Friday is one aspect of a search for intelligent life in the universe that is being addressed in many ways. In addition to optical methods, we look of course at radio wavelengths, and as we begin to characterize the atmospheres...
New Dip for Boyajian’s Star
Twitter action has been fast and furious with this morning's news of the first clear dip in light from Boyajian's Star (KIC 8462852) since the Kepler data. #TabbysStar IS DIPPING! OBSERVE!! @NASAKepler @LCO_Global @keckobservatory @AAVSO @nexssinfo @NASA @NASAHubble...
Astronomy Rewind: Keeping Our Data Alive
When I was growing up, there was a small outbuilding between my house and the stand of woods behind our property. The previous owner had built it as a little house in its own right, everything on a miniature scale, so that while it looked like an actual house -- with...
Citizen SETI
I love watching people who have a passion for science constructing projects in ways that benefit the community. I once dabbled in radio astronomy through the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers, and I could also point to the SETI League, with 1500 members on all...
SETI in the Anthropocene
Have we, as some have argued, entered a new 'age of humanity,' the so-called Anthropocene? The notion is controversial in many quarters, but it addresses the growing concern about our human influence on the Earth and the nature of planetary change. David Grinspoon's...