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17 May 2006: Cerro Pachón, an 8,800-foot (2,682-meter) mountain peak in northern Chile, has been selected as the site for the proposed Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The mountain is already home to the Gemini South telescope and the SOAR telescope. LSST Press Release

12 May 2006: The NOAO Long Range Plan for 2006-2010 has been published (login required). Highlights include our continued involvement in the development of large telescopes (LSST and GSMT), as well as creating ways to access the large amount of data that will be generated (DPP and NVO).

4 May 2006: The giant planet is in opposition this month, and the Kitt Peak Visitor Center is highlighting this chance to see it large in the night sky with an event called "Just Look at Jupiter!" On Saturday, May 20, Adam Showman of the UA Lunar and Planetary Lab will give a presentation, followed by observations of Jupiter (and other deep space objects) with the 20-inch RC telescope in the Visitor Center observatory.

21 April 2006: A new Gemini Observatory image of NGC 246, nicknamed the "Skull Nebula," shows what can happen as the outer atmosphere of a fast-moving, dying star similar in composition to the Sun (in several billion years) pushes through its local cloud of interstellar gas and dust.

13 April 2006: New high-resolution measurements of the famous massive star Eta Carinae using the NOAO-built Phoenix infrared spectrograph on Gemini South show that the star's bipolar nebula is the result of an aspherical explosion during its mid-19th century outburst, as opposed to the nebula being “pinched” by surrounding material.

4 April 2006: This image is a wide-field view of the star-forming region NGC 281 taken with the WIYN 0.9-meter at Kitt Peak National Observatory. It is featured as the ground based image for this Hubble Heritage Image Release.

28 March 2006: Active observing ends on March 31, but dark-sky data will be accepted at the GLOBE at Night program for another week. NOAO is a major co-sponsor of this international public outreach activity, which has involved more than 12,200 people and 3,600 observations (and counting) from across the world.

16 March 2006: A team of astronomers led by Keivan Stassun of Vanderbilt University has used the Gemini South telescope and NOAO’s high-resolution infrared spectrograph Phoenix to uncover the dynamics of a pair of eclipsing brown dwarfs. The observations enabled the team to directly weigh and measure the brown dwarfs (often called “failed stars” for their intermediate mass between planets and stars). The Gemini data complemented data the team gathered from Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo.

6 March 2006: The new NOAO/NSO Newsletter includes articles on a variety of science results from the Magellanic Clouds, the commissioning of the NIFS spectrograph at Gemini North, the new NOAO NVO Portal, the SOAR telescope, and the future of imaging at WIYN.

24 February 2006: The NOAO Data Products Program has unveiled a new Web-based tool to discover, access, and analyze astronomical imaging data from public archives. This effort is part of a larger program to provide the community with simple, consistent, astronomer-friendly interfaces to the tools and resources of the National Virtual Observatory (NVO).

8 February 2006: This artist concept illustrates new Spitzer Space Telescope observations of an unusual class of interacting binary stars that emit excess amounts of infrared radiation, suggesting that these odd objects are surrounded by large disks of cool dust. The results were produced by one of six teams of professional astronomers and high school teachers participating in a unique program co-sponsored by the Spitzer Science Center and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). NOAO Press Release 06-04

3 February 2006: The American Astronomical Society (AAS) has awarded its 2006 Education Prize to Dr. Sidney Wolff, an astronomer and former director of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. The AAS Education Prize recognizes outstanding contributions to the education of the public, students and/or the next generation of professional astronomers. NOAO Press Release 06-05

26 January 2006: Strong darkening observed around the equator of Vega suggests that the fifth brightest star in Earth’s sky has a huge temperature difference of 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit from its cool equatorial region to its hot poles. Jason Aufdenberg of NOAO led a team using the CHARA array on Mount Wilson to obtain this result. NOAO Press Release 06-03.

11 January 2006: A team led by a University of Florida astronomer has discovered a planet orbiting a star about 100 light-years from Earth. The star is just 600 million years old, one of the youngest stars ever found with a planetary companion. The discovery was made at Kitt Peak National Observatory with a new interferometric instrument called the Exoplanet Tracker (ET) that promises to greatly expand the efficiency of searches for new exoplanets.

9 January 2006: A team led by astronomers from CTIO has found faint visible echoes of three ancient supernovae by detecting their centuries-old light as it is reflected by clouds of interstellar dust hundreds of light-years removed from the original explosions. The oldest one is likely to have occurred more than six hundred years ago. More in NOAO Press Release 05-12. Additionally, the team has used the Gemini South telescope in Chile to obtain a detailed spectrum of an echo of light from an ancient supernova that enables them to identify the original star’s cause of death. More in NOAO Press Release 06-02.

28 December 2005: A team led by astronomers from CTIO has found faint visible echoes of three ancient supernovae by detecting their centuries-old light as it is reflected by clouds of interstellar dust hundreds of light-years removed from the original explosions. The oldest one is likely to have occurred more than six hundred years ago.

14 December 2005: More than half of the largest galaxies in the nearby universe have collided and merged with another galaxy in the past two billion years, according to a new study using hundreds of images from two of the deepest sky surveys ever conducted. The idea of large galaxies being assembled primarily by mergers rather than evolving by themselves in isolation has grown to dominate cosmological thinking. However, a troubling inconsistency within this general theory has been that the most massive galaxies appear to be the oldest, leaving minimal time since the Big Bang for the mergers to have occurred.

2 December 2005: M31 is the nearest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way, located a mere 2.2 million light-years distant. The Local Group Galaxies Survey team used the Mosaic camera on the Kitt Peak Mayall 4-meter telescope to investigate M31’s substantial population of young, massive stars over a very large field of view. Each of the squares in the image, featured on the cover of the December, 2005 NOAO Newsletter, is half a degree on a side, about the size of the full Moon.

17 November 2005: Coming up in January, Saturn will be at opposition, appearing at its largest in the skies of Earth. This image of Saturn and its moon Titan (lower right) was taken during the Kitt Peak Advanced Observing Program, using a set of stacked images from a Web cam on the Kitt Peak Visitor Center 20-inch telescope.

19 October 2005: In this giant star-forming region, also called 30 Doradus, energy from hot, young stars creates dramatic voids and filaments in the surrounding gas. The nebula is located 160,000 light-years distant in the southern constellation Dorado, within the galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud. This image was taken with the Curtis Schmidt telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, as part of the Magellanic Cloud Emission Line Survey (MCELS) project.