Six months have passed since a European rocket lofted the James Webb Space Telescope into orbit. Since that time, the ultra-complex telescope has successfully unfolded its expansive sunshield, commissioned its science instruments, and reached an observation point more than 1 million km from Earth.

This white-knuckle period in space followed nearly two decades of effort to design, build, and test the telescope on Earth prior to its launch on Christmas Day, 2021. But now, all of that effort is in the rearview mirror, and Webb’s massive 6.5-meter diameter mirror is gazing outward and collecting scientific data and images. It is the largest and most powerful telescope that humans have ever put into space, and it’s already revealing new insights about our cosmos.

Should be amazing! More details here

A unique telescope that focuses light with a slowly spinning bowl of liquid mercury instead of a solid mirror has opened its eye to the skies above India. Such telescopes have been built before, but the 4-meter-wide International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) is the first large one to be purpose-built for astronomy, at the kind of high-altitude site observers prize—the 2450-meter Devasthal Observatory in the Himalayas. More here

Three years ago, the first ever image of a black hole stunned the world. A black pit of nothingness enclosed by a fiery ring of light. That iconic image of the black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87 came into focus thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope, a global network of synchronized radio dishes acting as one giant telescope.

Now, a pair of Columbia researchers have devised a potentially easier way of gazing into the abyss.

Read the full article here.

Not looking good!

NASA is continuing to diagnose a problem with the payload computer on the Hubble Space Telescope after completing another set of tests on June 23 and 24. The payload computer halted on June 13 and the spacecraft stopped collecting science data. The telescope itself and its science instruments remain in good health and are currently in a safe configuration.

The spacecraft has two payload computers, one of which serves as a backup, that are located on the Science Instrument and Command and Data Handling (SI C&DH) unit. There are various pieces of hardware which make up both payload computers, including but not limited to:

More info here –

Gas to Stars

Each of the many hundreds of stars we can see with our naked eye, or the many thousands we can see with the aid of telescopes, has their own special story of how they came to be. Now self-gravitating balls of gas, these stars in the night sky began as clumps in dense molecular clouds. Once these clumps become large enough, they gravitationally collapse and form stars. In our own galaxy, the Milky Way, we can  study this process directly, and use the observations to infer much about its workings in more distant galaxies.

Read more here – https://astrobites.org/2021/05/07/molecular-clouds-all-the-way-down/