Tonight we saw one of the biggest of the future orbiting astronomy telescopes laid out before our eyes. It’s an observatory we’ve all known is coming for a long time—the James Webb Space Telescope, set for launch in about seven years. The Northrup Grumman people (who are the prime contractors) gave a symposium tonight, presenting the science we’ll be able to do with the JWST, and also a little peek at how the fabrication is going.

What’s really cool is that they brought a full scale model of the telescope and set it up in a courtyard outside the convention center. I remember back in 1988, when I was first back in school, preparing for grad school, and working on the CU half of the Goddard High Resolution Spectograph team and being majorly impressed with the Hubble Space Telescope and its future capabilities. Tonight I got a rush of that same feeling, and I can’t WAIT to see what this telecope will do. If you want to learn more about this infrared-optimized telescope that will orbit at a LaGrange point and reach its gaze out to the earliest epochs of time in the cosmos, check out their James Webb Web Site.

So, what else did we hear about today?

For one thing, the first triple quasar ever discovered was presented this morning at an early press conference and then later in a paper session. The chief scientist on this venture was George Djorgovski, a professor at Caltech, and the fellow who led the team that produced the Big Picture” showcased at Griffith Observatory. I worked with George long-distance while writing the captions for the exhibits, but we’d never met in person until today.

Also presented today was a paper on discoveries of quasars in the Zone of Avoidance, a region of the sky that is “covered” by the plane of the Milky Way. It’s traditionally been hard to observe through the Milky Way, but now tradition has been cast aside by a team of Korean astronomers who observed the ZOA and searched out radio or near-infrared signals from quasars through all the interference from our own galaxy. You can read their press release and see figures by downloading files from their site.

Cornell University announced that a group of observers using the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico discovered some unusual blasts of radiation from the Crab Nebula and its embedded pulsar. Arecibo is threatened with closure, even though it is doing amazing and productive science. It seems that the review committee that is recommending shutdown isn’t aware of the contributions this dish is making, and so the story about the Crab Nebula is getting some traction here.

Finally, Hubble Space Telescope released a stunning image of a region of hot young stars that have carved out space in their birth clouds in the Small Magellanic Cloud. You can read more about this image here.

These are just a few of the many topics discussed today—astronomy information is pouring out like water from a firehose. It’s just amazing! Tune in tomorrow for more!