Web wanderings: astronomy without a telescope

A focusing telescope for gamma-ray astronomy

With the development of the Laue Lens, gamma-ray astronomy is presently realizing the step that virtually all branches of astronomy have accomplished since Lippershey’s invention 400 years ago: the focusing telescope. In a Laue lens, gamma-rays interact coherently inside a crystal via Bragg-diffraction; a large number of diffraction crystals are oriented in a way to deviate incident photons ont...

Professional Astronomy without a Librarian

Virtually every “serious” place where professional astronomy is done has a librarian, even if shared with the physics or math department. Since its creation in 1994 of Departamento de Astronomı́a (DA) of Universidad de Guanajuato (UG) it was neither provided with a librarian, nor with proper space for its holdings, nor with a budget allowing institutional journal subscriptions. I describe my exp...

International Year of Astronomy. A brief history of the telescope.

The Magic Telescope Project for Gamma Astronomy above 10 Gev

A project to construct a 17 m diameter imaging air Čerenkov telescope, called the MAGIC Telescope, is described. The aim of the project is to close the observation gap in the γ-ray sky extending from 10 GeV as the highest energy measurable by space-borne experiments to 300 GeV, the lowest energy measurable by the current generation of ground-based Čerenkov telescopes. The MAGIC Telescope will i...

Astronomy. Telescope clash deeply rooted in Hawaii's past.

A month after protests halted work on the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Hawaii’s Big Island, the impasse over what would be one of the world’s largest optical telescopes has deepened. Last week, as protesters continue to occupy the construction site on Mauna Kea, a 4205-meter dormant volcano, a state panel representing Native Hawaiians pulled its support for the project. The 30 April decision...