[vamp1ro]

Hubble to Use Moon as a Mirror to Capture Venus Passing in Front of Sun - Last Time This Century

This mottled landscape showing the impact crater Tycho is among the most violent-looking places on our moon. Astronomers didn't aim NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study Tycho, however. The image was taken in preparation to observe the transit of Venus across the sun's face on June 5-6.

Hubble cannot look at the sun directly, so astronomers are planning to point the telescope at the Earth's moon, using it as a mirror to capture reflected sunlight and isolate the small fraction of the light that passes through Venus's atmosphere. Imprinted on that small amount of light are the fingerprints of the planet's atmospheric makeup.

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Source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblo...g-in-front-of-sun-last-time-this-century.html

 

[Jinn DMZ]

The Hubble fucking rules. I always love admiring the crazy shit it captures.

 

[B-Dawg]

Hubble Got'chu

 

[vamp1ro]

The Hubble fucking rules. I always love admiring the crazy shit it captures.

If you enjoy Hubble's results, you'll love Kepler's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_telescope

The Kepler spacecraft is an American space observatory, the space-based portion of NASA's Kepler Mission to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.[4] The spacecraft, named in honor of the 17th-century German astronomer Johannes Kepler,[5] was launched in March 2009[6] with a planned mission lifetime of at least 3.5 years; in 2012, the mission was extended to 2016.[7][8]

The Kepler mission is "specifically designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover dozens of Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets."[9] Kepler's only instrument is a photometer that continually monitors the brightness of over 145,000 main sequence stars in a fixed field of view.[10] This data is transmitted to Earth, then analyzed to detect periodic dimming caused by extrasolar planets that cross in front of their host star.

 

[Jinn DMZ]

Yeah, Kepler's the one that found all those supposed "super earth's" not too long ago I believe.

Both are fantastic.

 

[vamp1ro]

Yeah, Kepler has found several exoplanets and Earth-like planets. In December 2011 Kepler discovered 2 Earth-like planets orbiting a star similar to our sun.

Kepler Planet Count
Confirmed Planets: 61
Planet Candidates: 2,326
Eclipsing Binary Stars: 2,165​