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3 September 2008: This issue includes articles on building the ReSTAR system, 2009A Observing Proposal deadlines and available instruments (including classical observing with Gemini), a science highlight on light echoes of galactic supernovae, and a follow-up report on the GSMT Chicago workshop.

20 August 2008: Dr. R. Chris Smith has been selected as the next director of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). Smith will succeed Dr. Alistair Walker in November. Walker will return to the scientific staff of CTIO after five years as director.

29 July 2008: The ALTAIR (Access to Large Telescopes for Astronomical Instruction and Research) committee, recently convened by NOAO, seeks to understand the needs of the US community related to ground-based O/IR telescopes in the 6.5- to 10-m aperture range. We ask you to respond to the ALTAIR committee survey regarding your current and future anticipated use of such facilities, including Gemini.

22 July 2008: Astronomer Pierre Martin, director of science operations at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), has been selected as the new director of the WIYN Observatory, which operates 3.5-meter and 0.9-meter telescopes on Kitt Peak. Starting September 22, Martin succeeds George Jacoby, who will return to the scientific staff of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO).

14 July 2008: Around May 1, 1006 A.D., observers from Africa to Europe to the Far East witnessed and recorded the arrival of light from what is now called SN 1006, a tremendous supernova explosion caused by the final death throes of a white dwarf star. This image of SN1006 is a composite of optical, radio, and X-ray data of the full shell of the supernova remnant. The optical data was obtained at the University of Michigan’s 0.9-meter Curtis Schmidt telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. H-alpha, continuum-subtracted data were provided by FrankWinkler (Middlebury College) et al. The object has an angular size of roughly 30 arcminutes (about the size of the full Moon), and a physical size of 60 light-years, based on its distance of nearly 7,000 light-years.

3 July 2008: n what appears to be a masterful illusion, astronomers at Gemini Observatory have imaged two nearly identical spiral galaxies in Virgo, 90 million light years distant, in the early stages of a gentle gravitational embrace. The new image was obtained at the Gemini South telescope in Chile using GMOS, the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph. Like two skaters grabbing hands while passing, NGC 5427 (the nearly open-faced spiral galaxy at lower left) and its southern twin NGC 5426 (the more oblique galaxy at upper right), are in the throes of a slow but disturbing interaction-one that could take a hundred million years to complete.

25 June 2008: UK astronomers have reached a milestone in the construction of one of the largest-ever cameras designed to detect the mysterious component of the Universe known as Dark Energy. The pieces of glass for the five unique lenses in the Dark Energy Camera have been shipped from the US to France to be shaped and polished into their final form. The largest of the five is one meter in diameter, making it one of the largest lenses in the world. The camera will be placed on NSF’s Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to conduct a project called the Dark Energy Survey (DES), as well as other observations for the astronomical community. DES observations will start in 2011 and continue until 2016.

19 June 2008: Call it the case of the missing dwarf. A team of stellar astronomers is engaged in an interstellar crime scene investigation. They have two suspects, traces of assault and battery, but no corpse. The southern planetary nebula SuWt 2 (seen in this color image taken with the 1.5-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile) is the scene of the crime, some 6,500 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Centaurus.

2 June 2008: The June 2008 NOAO/NSO Newsletter includes articles on the new ALTAIR committee on large telescopes, a science highlight and operational report from the NEWFIRM infrared imager at Kitt Peak, and the results from a survey of the community on their use of the Gemini Observatory.

19 May 2008: Read about the results of our Gemini Opportunity survey of the community, which showed great interest in increased US participation in Gemini. This issue of Currents also explains the need for active involvement by the community in the Giant Segmented Mirror Telescope project, as we move toward public-private GSMT partnerships.

5 May 2008: The international star-hunting activity known as GLOBE at Night, led by the NOAO educational outreach group, inspired 6,838 measurements of night-sky brightness by citizen scientists around the world, including 660 digital measurements using handheld sky-quality meters. The third edition of GLOBE at Night was held from February 25-March 8. Just over 4,800 of the measurements came from the United States (with 48 states and the District of Columbia reporting at least one measurement). Observers in Hungary submitted the most measurements (380) from outside the U.S., followed by Romania, the Czech Republic, Costa Rica, and Spain, all with over 100 observations.

24 April 2008: The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) has selected Dr. David Silva as the new director of NOAO. Silva brings a wide variety of experience to this appointment, from his current duties as Observatory Scientist for the Thirty Meter Telescope project to past responsibilities for data management and user support at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Germany. During a prior tenure at NOAO from 1991 to 1996, Silva served as project manager during the commissioning of the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope on Kitt Peak, and as a staff astronomer in the U.S. office of the Gemini Observatory. Silva is scheduled to formally start work as director on July 7.

9 April 2008: The well-known naked-eye star cluster Omega Centauri may be home to an elusive intermediate-mass black hole, according to observations made with the Gemini Multi-object Spectrograph (GMOS) at Gemini South in Chile and the Hubble Space Telescope. A new study by astronomers Eva Noyola (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics) and Karl Gebhardt (University of Texas, Austin) found non-luminous matter at the center of Omega Centauri with roughly 40,000 times the mass of the Sun. This result could lead to an understanding of how such intermediate black holes might evolve into the larger supermassive ones found at the cores of many galaxies; it also suggests that Omega Centauri may once have been a dwarf galaxy.

2 April 2008: The LSST primary/tertiary mirror experienced a successful “high fire” over the weekend of March 28-29, reaching a peak temperature of approximately 1165°C (2125°F). The LSST mirror will now anneal and cool gradually to room temperature over the next 100 days in the slowly rotating oven at the UA Steward Observatory Mirror Lab, and will be removed in mid-August to begin grinding and polishing.

19 March 2008: More than 51,000 pounds of glass has been loaded into the mold for the primary and tertiary mirrors for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). Inset pictures show employees from the University of Arizona Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory placing the first pieces of glass into the mold. The glass will be melted and then spun inside the rotating oven to create the 8.4-meter mirror.

13 March 2008: John Carr of the Naval Research Laboratory and Joan Najita of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory developed a new technique to measure and analyze the chemical composition of the gases within protoplanetary disks using the infrared spectrograph on the Spitzer Space Telescope. They discovered large amounts of simple organic gases and water vapor in a possible planet-forming region around the infant star AA Tauri, which they report in the March 14 issue of Science magazine.

3 March 2008: This dark-skies awareness activity led by NOAO and the GLOBE Program has drawn more than 5,500 measurements from citizen-scientists all over the world since it began on February 25. Get out before March 9 and look up at the constellation Orion (seen here over the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory) to add to the growing database!

19 February 2008: Intended as a sparkplug for communication between NOAO and our community, this new electronic newsletter provides updates—and solicits community input—on NOAO observing opportunities and NOAO programs and policies on a more rapid timescale than is possible with the quarterly NOAO-NSO Newsletter. The first issue includes articles on ReSTAR, Gemini, and supernova spectroscopy.

31 January 2008: A new wide-field image of Pickering’s Triangle taken with the National Science Foundation’s Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory was released recently at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. This nebula is part of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant, which includes the famous Veil Nebula. It is located about 1,500 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan. Astronomers estimate that the supernova explosion that produced the nebula occurred between 5,000 to 10,000 years ago; the entire shell stretches more than six full Moons in width across the sky.

11 January 2008: Suggests Major Revisions to Concepts of Disk Structure and Luminosity. Observations of the interacting binary star using telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that the disks of hot gas that accumulate around a wide variety of astronomical objects—from degenerate stars in energetic binary systems to supermassive black holes at the hearts of active galaxies—are likely to be much larger than previously believed. Released at the 211th AAS Meeting in Austin.