What does a half million galaxies look like?

Whoa. That’s a part of a huge image just released by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey Deep Field #1, a ginormous mosaic of the night sky… and by ginormous, I mean GINORMOUS. It covers a solid square degree of sky — 5 times the area of the full Moon — and tips the scale at a whopping 370 megapixels! It took 5 years and several hundred hours of observing time with the 3.6 meter telescope on top of Mauna Kea to get this massive mosaic.

New Space Telescope Could Search for Both Exoplanets and Dark New Space Telescope Could Search for Both Exoplanets and Dark Energy

Dark energy may not have much in common with aliens, unless there's a flotilla of freaky monoliths out there with really weird physical properties. But astrophysicists hope to build a two-in-one space telescope that can search for signs of dark energy along with exoplanets.

It's a dog eat dog universe

The project, currently halfway complete, uses the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope to get a closer look on our nearest big galaxy, Andromeda (about two million light years away).

On Top of the World With the SETI Institute

Jeff and a guest joined Franck on a spectacular expedition, which involved a personal tour of the CFHT (Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope) Observatory, which is situated atop the dormant Mauna Kea volcano that rises 4,200 meters above the Pacific Ocean on the island of Hawaii.

CFHT in the news

The Andromeda galaxy, the closest neighbour to our own Milky Way, has been growing by scooping up stars from smaller surrounding galaxies, a Canadian-led team of astronomers has found.

The astronomers found that Andromeda's gravity is pulling millions of stars away from its neighbour, the Triangulum galaxy, and calculate that in a few billions years, Andromeda could consume Triangulum completely.

The discovery comes as a result of the largest survey of a galaxy ever made, spanning nearly one million light years around Andromeda, a galaxy about 2.5 million light years away and visible to the naked eye. Triangulum is visible using a small telescope.

Alan McConnachie of the National Research Council's Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics led the international team of astronomers that included scientists from Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Britain and the United States.

HOKU

Newest edition of HOKU is now available online.

CFHT and Chandra X-Ray image...

A very nice image combining ground based and space images here.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Collection: The Crab Nebula

Astronomers Discover Youngest and Lowest Mass Dwarfs

Astronomers have found three brown dwarfs with estimated masses of less than 10 times that of Jupiter, making them among the youngest and lowest mass sub-stellar objects detected in the solar neighborhood to date.

Oldest and Most Distant Water in the Universe Detected

Astronomers have found the most distant signs of water in the Universe to date.