Topic: Astronomers Begin Observing Hanny's Voorwerp with the Hubble Space Telescope

[sam]

A storybook astronomy mystery is now part of the most famous telescope in history. A team of astronomers secured time on the Hubble Space Telescope to observe Hanny's Voorwerp, the unusual object found by Dutch teacher Hanny Van Arkel while she was scanning through images for the Galaxy Zoo project. Hubble will be trained on the Voorwerp during three separate observing sessions, the first of which occurred on April 4, 2010. "The WFC3 (Wide Field Camera 3) images were obtained (Sunday)," said Principal Investigator Bill Keel from the University of Alabama in an email to Universe Today "and I was able to pull the calibrated files over last night for a quick look. Combining pairs of offset images to reject cosmic rays optimally will take some further work, but we're happy to start working with the data and see what emerges at each step."

http://www.universetoday.com/2010/04/06/astronomers-begin-observing-hannys-voorwerp-with-the-hubble-space-telescope/

[Clive]

Another celestial mystery waiting to be solved!