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Astronomy can be like a professional sport. It’s fun to watch what’s going on day after day, reading the magazines and web site articles for all the current events in astronomy. Big things happen nearly every day. That includes new images brought in from satellites and telescopes, new discoveries about the nature of planets and stars and other objects, as well as breakthroughs and just every day small progress in the tools and techniques used to make these discoveries.

NASA’s  website contains a lot of this information.  NASA stays on top of all the latest events, and even makes a lot of the news itself.  A quick look at NASA’s web site in mid November revealed some pretty big current events in astronomy.

One of the most important current events in astronomy NASA discussed in November was the late month launch of the shuttle Endeavour.  It setout on a mission to refuel the International Space Station.  This included a number of space walks to perform routine maintenance on the outside of the station.  Space walks not only accomplish a purpose, they teach NASA a lot for the future.  While some might argue that the space station is more space related than necessarily astronomy related, there is a lot of science going on there, including observations of outer space which definitely falls under the heading of astronomy.

Another astronomy current event discussed by NASA in November was a staggering discovery made by the Hubble Telescope. For the first time in history, a telescope took a visible light image of a planet orbiting another star. The effort dates way back to the 1980’s when NASA’s IRAS, an infrared telescope, discovered dust around the star. That was a tell tale sign that planets might orbit this star located about 25 light years away from our own little planet.

This one, still one of the current events in astronomy, is all about the past. NASA announced details of a Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project designed to restore images of the moon taken by five Lunar Orbiter spacecraft that visited the moon in 1966 and 1967. Much of the data was removed from the tape drives in the 1980’s, but stored as analogue images and only partially restored. NASA has already released some of these restored historic images.

Astronomy is a huge field. Current events in astronomy could cover volumes each day. Keep looking into the universe!

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