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23 September 2009: IC 5067, a star forming region in Cygnus, is also sometimes called the Pelican Nebula. This image was taken May 24, 2009 by Gregor Rothfuss, a first time visitor to the Kitt Peak Advanced Observing Program, with the help of Kitt Peak Visitor Center operator Flynn Haase. They used the VC 20-inch RC telescope with an SBIG STL-6303E camera and AstroDon LRGB filters. Exposures were 120:40:40:40 respectively. This was Mr. Rothfuss’s first experience doing CCD imaging. The Kitt Peak Visitor Center program, which receives no financial support from the observatory, offers paying guests the opportunity to do their own observing and imaging.

18 August 2009: New funds allocated for ReSTAR by the NSF will provide immediate access to the Palomar 200-inch telescope, fund a copy of the OSMOS optical spectrograph for the Mayall 4-m and more.

13 July 2009: Composite image showing a view of Kitt Peak looking north from near the location of the 0.9-m dome. Left: a re-discovered image from Dr. Aden Meinel taken during his first visit to the summit while scouting potential sites for the National Observatory. Right: image by Dr. John Glaspey from April 2009, shows the changes that have taken place in the last 50 years.

9 June 2009: This issue includes an article by Andrei Tokovinin about speckle interferometry at the SOAR telescope. Short-exposure images of a 1.08" binary star were co-added with re-centering on the global centroid (left), or on the brightest pixel, selecting the sharpest 10 percent of images (right). This latter technique, dubbed “lucky imaging”, is gaining popularity .

3 June 2009: Former NOAO Director Jeremy Mould (at left on Kitt Peak), professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne School of Physics, Australia joins Wendy Freedman (top right), director of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena, California, USA and Robert Kennicutt (bottom right), director of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge in England as the recipients of the 2009 Cosmology Prize of the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation.

18 May 2009: The Orion Nebula seen with the infrared eyes of the WIYN High Resolution Infrared Camera (WHIRC) in the emission lines of HeI (1083 nm; blue), FeII (1644 nm; green), and H2 (2122 nm; red).

21 April 2009: This Mayall 4-m image of the Medusa Nebula was released during the "Around the World in 80 Telescopes" webcast held from April 3-4, 2009.

6 April 2009: This Blanco 4-m image of NGC 6520, and nearby dustcloud Barnard 86, was released during the "Around the World in 80 Telescopes" webcast held from April 3-4, 2009.

13 March 2009: The “GLOBE at Night” citizen-science campaign has reached 10,000 contributed measurements during its 13 day campaign this year in March!

9 March 2009: Finding a needle in a haystack might be easy compared to finding two very similar black holes closely orbiting each other in a distant galaxy. Astronomers from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson have found what looks like two massive black holes orbiting each other in the center of one galaxy.

3 March 2009: This issue highlights science being done with telescopes available through the broader "System" of telescope access, and includes articles on new and upcoming instruments for SOAR in Chile and WIYN on Kitt Peak.

24 February 2009: This image of R136, the massive star cluster at the center of the 30 Doradus nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud was taken on Spartan’s second commissioning run on the SOAR telescope.

20 February 2009: NOAO astronomer and U.S. IYA Project Director Stephen Pompea shows off the “Galileoscope” student telescope kit in Paris.

29 January 2009: NOAO astronomer and U.S. IYA Project Director Stephen Pompea shows off the “Galileoscope” student telescope kit at IYA opening ceremonies at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris.

23 December 2008: Professor Edmondson was one of the major players in the creation of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) and the National Observatory.

2 December 2008: This issue includes articles on a NEWFIRM large-scale survey, science highlights from several NOAO Survey Programs, and a report from NOAO Director David Silva on “Strategy, Tactics, and Budgetary Results.”

18 November 2008: Astronomers using the Gemini North telescope and W.M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea have obtained the first-ever direct images identifying a multi-planet system around a normal star. The Gemini images allowed the international team to make the initial discovery of two of the planets in the confirmed planetary system.

30 October 2008: The 8.4-meter mirror blank for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) has been successfully lifted from the furnace hearth at the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, installed into a turning ring, and tilted to a vertical position. It is now ready for core cleanout, which will reduce its mass from 46,500 kg to 16,600 kg. The mirror is scheduled to be completed in January 2012, and will be the largest two-surface optical mirror ever made from a single substrate.

7 October 2008: A deep new image of the Virgo cluster has revealed monumental tendrils of ionized hydrogen gas 400,000 light-years long connecting the elliptical galaxy M86 and the disturbed spiral galaxy NGC 4438. Taken with the wide-field Mosaic imager on the National Science Foundation’s Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, this Hydrogen-alpha image and related spectroscopic measurements of the filament provide striking evidence of a previously unsuspected high-speed collision between the two galaxies, creating enough heat to slow down and even stop star formation in the galaxy.

15 September 2008: A U.S. astronomer using the Gemini South and Blanco telescopes in Chile has added a startling new clue to the ongoing mystery over the "engine" of the historical 1843 outburst of Eta Carinae, a bright star in the southern skies. The new observations by Nathan Smith of the University of California, Berkeley, reveal faint but extremely fast material indicative of a powerful shock wave produced by the 1843 event, suggesting that its driving mechanism was an explosion rather than a steady wind. The result is featured in the September 11, 2008 issue of the journal Nature.