Press Releases: Kitt Peak National Observatory

16 September 2003: Case Western Reserve University astronomers have announced the discovery of a new galaxy, termed Andromeda VIII. The new galaxy is so widespread and transparent that astronomers did not suspect its existence until they mapped the velocity of stars thought to belong to the well-known and nearby large Andromeda spiral galaxy and found them to move independently of Andromeda.

9 July 2003: Astronomers have assembled the first effective model for both the shape and evolutionary history of the Owl Nebula, the well-known planetary nebula in the constellation Ursa Major.

25 June 2003: The University of Arizona and National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) will bring top scientists and world-class telescope facilities to the NASA-funded search for life on other planets, strengthening the “astro“ part of the U.S. space agency’s astrobiology program.

26 May 2003: An international team of astronomers has discovered seven extremely large circumstellar disks silhouetted against the forming stars that they surround. These new disks are 10 to 100 times larger than both our solar system and other planet-forming disks that have been imaged previously, suggesting that it may be possible for planets to form at much larger distances from their stars than previously thought.

10 May 2003: In one of the largest and most detailed celestial images ever made, the coil-shaped Helix Nebula is being unveiled today in celebration of Astronomy Day. The resulting composite picture is a seamless blend of ultra-sharp NASA Hubble Space Telescope images combined with the wide view of the Mosaic Camera on the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. The image shows a fine web of filamentary “bicycle-spoke” features embedded in the colorful red and blue gas ring, which is one of the nearest planetary nebulae to Earth.

24 April 2003: Four major research organizations have joined forces to build a world-class telescope that will survey the entire sky in a relentless search for supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, near-Earth asteroids and the mysterious energy of expansion in the Universe known as dark energy.

5 March 2003: A team of astronomers headed by Frank Winkler of Middlebury College has combined precise digital observations with simple mathematics to estimate the apparent brightness of an exploding star whose light reached Earth nearly a thousand years ago, when it produced a display that was probably the brightest stellar event witnessed in recorded human history.

10 October 2002: All U.S. astronomers will gain competitive access to the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes starting early next year via an innovative new National Science Foundation program administered by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO).

26 September 2002: The violent beauty of solar storms and their potentially serious effects on Earth’s environment and its economy are the central themes of the Space Weather Center, a major traveling exhibit that will make its debut at the Kitt Peak Visitor Center with a ribbon-cutting reception on Tuesday, October 8, at 5:30 p.m.

21 August 2002: Students from Yale University used the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory to capture a series of still images of asteroid 2002 NY40 on August 15-16, two nights before its close flyby of Earth.

10 June 2002: Due to the extremely high fire danger and the possibility of dry lightning strikes, Kitt Peak National Observatory is closing public access to its grounds and the Kitt Peak Visitor Center at 2 p.m. daily instead of the normal 4 p.m. The time change will have an impact on the last guided tour of the day, which will start 30 minutes earlier than normal. The public picnic grounds have already been closed to visitors until further notice.

3 June 2002: New observations of the richly populated star cluster NGC 2420 taken by the refurbished WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory suggest that the cluster contains a multitude of clues about the history and evolution of the Milky Way.

30 December 2001:

28 August 2001: Astronomers have discovered a double star system, known as a massive X-ray binary, with an orbit so elongated that the twosome appears to have barely survived the disruptive effects of the supernova that transformed them into a fountain of X-ray energy.

26 April 2001: Infrared astronomy pioneer Dr. Fred Gillett died Sunday, April 22, 2001 at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle at the age of 64, following a months-long battle with a rare bone marrow disorder.

19 March 2001: A consortium led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Indiana University and Yale University has been selected to assume operational responsibility for the historic 0.9-meter (36-inch) telescope at the National Science Foundation's Kitt Peak National Observatory.

28 February 2001: Using an off-the-shelf camera set for a long exposure and satellite data freely available on the Internet, solar scientist Bill Livingston has developed a dependable method for taking pictures of commercial communications satellites hovering high above Earth.

9 January 2001: Astronomers surveying hundreds of red giant stars in more than a dozen globular star clusters have found clues that may reveal an unexpected origin of lithium, the third element in the Periodic Table.

8 January 2001: The simple spherical geometry of planetary nebula Abell 39 will help astronomers identify the source of very serious errors in measuring the chemical composition of dying stars.

8 January 2001: The National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Deep Wide-Field Survey marks its first release of data today with a large, exhibit-sized image of 300,000 faint galaxies and stars at the opening of the 197th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.