Search

The Astronomical League honors the nation's brightest rising stars. 'YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE BEEN INCREASINGLY denied access to astronomy,' declares the Astronomical League. According to the League, part of the reason [...]

A yearning for knowledge would lead a Nova Scotia son far from home to become the most honoured astronomer of his day--and, some think, the inspiration for Conan Doyle's villainous […]

Let this catalog of deep-sky objects be your guide to some of the best Southern Hemisphere sky sights. AFTER STUMBLING UPON THE Crab Nebula while following a comet in 1758, [...]

Invisible light? No one saw that coming. It was as astounding in 1800 as the discovery of microbes some 125 years earlier. This story begins with the Sun, which radiates [...]

The universe and everything would be going to fade away in another 100 billion years from now, leaving everything cold, lonely and isolated according to Professor Brian Schmidt. Every galaxy that could be seen is being pushed away faster and their light would not be able to reach us in about 100 billion years, except for the light of the galaxy that is gravitationally bound to us.

Astronomer Adam Riess received the 2011 Einstein Medal from the Albert Einstein Society in Switzerland February 18 for his role in discovering the accelerating expansion of the [...]

The American Astronomical Society announced November 5 it would award the first Lancelot M. Berkeley-New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy to Kepler team members William Borucki [...]

Arthur Stanley Eddington was educated at the University of Manchester and at Cambridge, and worked as a chief assistant at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, England. He received the Bruce medal in 1924. In 1913, he was appointed Plumian Professor of Astronomy at the Cambridge University. The subjects of his research were stellar motions, structure of stars and relativity. His contributions to astrophysics included 13 popular books, some of which have not yet been published, and the discovery of the nuclear based source of a star's energy. His only flaw was the disagreement he had with S. Chandrasekhar, a young astrophysicist, on the subject of gravitational collapse of stars with masses larger than 1.4 solar masses.

French astrophysicist Henri A. Deslanders began his career as a scientist at the l'Ecole Polytechnique in 1881, after resigning his commission as a military officer. He was recognized in the scientific community for various discoveries, among which are the concepts of astrophysics, lines and light emissions of ionized calcium as well as for applications of the spectroheliograph to study images of the sun. Deslanders also invented the spectrographic velocity recorder. He was the recipient of the 16th Bruce Medal given by the Astronomers Society of the Pacific.

The Queen Victoria Museum in Tasmania, Australia, announced March 1 that Alan Rogers won the 2010 Grote Reber Medal. The award recognizes outstanding and innovative contributions to radio astronomy. Rogers, [...]

On Australia Day AG's space columnist Professor Fred Watson was rewarded for his outstanding contribution to astronomy. 'It was a surprise and a great honour and I'm absolutely thrilled [to [...]

For his work on impact cratering and the discovery of the Moon's Orientale impact basin, the Meteoritical Society named William K. Hartmann its 2010 Barringer Medal [...]

The 2009 Edgar Wilson Award for amateur comet discoveries goes to Robert Holmes of the United States, Koichi Itagaki of Japan, Stanislav Maticic of Slovenia, Michael Ory of Switzerland, and [...]

THE 2004 EDGAR WILSON AWARD went to Vello Tabur and William Bradfield, both of Australia. The award, worth $20,000, is given by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory yearly to encourage amateurs [...]

The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory recently presented the 2003 Edgar Wilson Award for discoveries of comets by amateurs to five people. Each recipient received a plaque and a cash prize of [...]

The Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) awarded Kyle Smalley, 41, the 2003 Amateur Achievement Award for his 2002 asteroid research. Smalley became interested in the hobby of astronomy just [...]

In 1992, amid dwindling funding for high-school science programs, Charles Allen saw the need to involve more of America's youth in astronomy. He and other key members of the Astronomical […]

Houston amateur Don Pearce is at last convinced that he holds the record for observing very old and very young Moons back to back. To the best of his (and [...]

The 2015 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization has gone to astronomer and Committee for Skeptical Inquiry Fellow Seth Shostak. The $5,000 prize comes from Wonderfest, a nonprofit organization in [...]

Admit it: you've imagined that someday you'll chance upon an undiscovered telescopic comet and have your name forever attached to it. In reality, discovering a comet usually takes hundreds of [...]

FORT COLLINS, Colo. -- A Colorado high-school student is the recipient of the 2003 National Young Astronomer Award (NYAA). Maxwell Moe, 18, won top honors for his study of the [...]

WHILE NOBEL PRIZES ARE AWARDED IN physics, few astronomers receive this honor. One exception occurred in 1993, when Joseph Taylor (now at Princeton University) and Russell Hulse (now at the [...]

OF ALL THE PEOPLE STAR TRAILS has profiled more than once, Clyde Tombaugh holds the record, and with good reason. When the discoverer of Pluto died in 1997, he was [...]

A spacecraft named Voyager has shown us the moons and rings of Uranus--and just how well a machine can perform Last January a spacecraft flew within 50,000 miles of the [...]

David Levy of Tucson, Arizona, an amateur astronomer and a comet hunter, has been awarded the 1993 Amateur Achievement Award. He has discovered 18 comets, including the famous Comet Shoemaker-Levy 1993e, which exploded while passing near Jupiter. He is a regular contributor to the magazine 'Sky and Telescope.' He uses a Dobsonian 16-inch reflector telescope or a Newtonian reflector with a camera, for his astronomical studies.

The Thomas J. Brennan Award introduced for the first time, is presented to Gary Sampson from Wisconsin for his contributions in teaching astronomy and astrophysics. He was a teacher of earth science and astronomy at the Wauwatosa West High School, Wisconsin, for 23 years. He had also been the director of the high school planetarium for 16 years, where he has actively involved in teaching programs for the public.

The 1993 Klumpke-Roberts Award is presented to David Morrison of the Space Science department at NASA/Ames Research Center, for his contributions to the popularization of Astronomy. Apart from publishing more than 100 research papers, he has written several books on popular science such as 'Exploring Planetary Worlds' and 'The Planetary System.' Morrison obtained his doctorate in Astronomy from Harvard University, and then joined the University of Hawaii as professor of astronomy and vice chancellor for research, and was elected director of the three-meter IRTF telescope in Hawaii. He has recently been involved in the investigation and popularization of the hazards of Earth-crossing asteroids.

Edouard Benjamin Baillaud (1848-1934), who won 1923 Bruce medal in 1923, was the director of the observatory at Toulouse, France, for 30 years. He also served as the Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Toulouse and was a very good administrator. He established the observatory on the Pic du Midi, one of the most famous observatories of the country.

George Smoot and John Mather have won Aviation Week's 1992 Space/Missile Laurel for their landmark cosmological research using NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer. The scientists discovered compelling evidence in favor of the Big Bang theory of creation.

The Trumpler Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific is given to Ph.D. dissertations in astronomy. The 1992 award was given to Qingde Wang, Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics at the University of Colorado. Wang used x-ray data to investigatethe global structure of the instellar medium in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a star-forming region in our galaxy. The interstellar medium is the material fromwhich stars originate.