Astronomy can be like a professional sport. Keeping up with it can be a lot of fun. Big things happen nearly every day. That includes new images brought in from satellites and telescopes, new discoveries about the nature of planets and stars and other objects, as well as breakthroughs and just every day small progress in the tools and techniques used to make these discoveries.

A good place to find out about a lot of this is on NASA’s website. NASA stays on top of all the latest events, and even makes a lot of the news itself. Here are just some of the current events shown in mid November of 2008.

One of the most important current events in astronomy NASA discussed in November was the late month launch of the shuttle Endeavour. Its mission was to re-supply and repair the International Space Station. This included a number of space walks to perform routine maintenance on the outside of the station. Space walks are not just spacewalks they are also learning experiences that apply to future missions. Space station work includes a lot of astronomy work.

The Hubble telescope chimed in to current events in astronomy with an amazing discovery. For the first time in history, a telescope took a visible light image of a planet orbiting another star. It all began in the 1980s when IRAS, a NASA satellite telescope, used infrared to discover dust around the star. Fat was a tipoff that there might be planets.

Current and events in astronomy can also be about what happened a long time ago. The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project is set to restore images taken of the moon by Lunar Orbiter spacecraft in 1966 and 1967. This data was taken from tape drives. NASA has already released some of these restored historic images.

Astronomy is as big as the universe it covers. Current events in astronomy go on forever. Keep looking into the universe!

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