Weekly SkyWatcher's Forecast - March 19-25, 2012

Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! The week starts off with new Moon and the perfect opportunity to do a Messier Marathon. The planets continue to dazzle as we not only celebrate the Vernal Equinox, but the March Geminid meteor shower as well! If that doesn't get your pulsar racing - nothing will. It's time to get out your binoculars and telescopes and meet me in the backyard!

The Care And Feeding Of Teenage Galaxies… And By The Way, They Need Gas

Got a teenager? Then you know the story. Go to look for your favorite bag of chips and they're gone. You eat one portion of meat and they need three. If you like those cookies, then you better have a darn good place to stash them. And, while you're at it, their car needs gas. Apparently there's a reason for the word "universal", because teenage galaxies aren't much different. Thanks to some new studies done by ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have been able to take a much closer look at adolescent galaxies and their "feeding habits" during their evolution. Some 3 to 5 billion years after the Big Bang they were happiest when just provided with gas, but later on they developed a voracious appetite... for smaller galaxies!

Weekly SkyWatcher's Forecast - March 12-18, 2012

Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! What an awesome display of planets! Please take the time to walk outdoors just after skydark - regardless of where you live - and enjoy the bright display of Venus and Jupiter! However, this isn't the only planetary action going on this week... Mars and M96 pair up, as well as Uranus and the Moon. There's even a Southern Hemisphere meteor shower to enjoy! Pretty exciting, huh? Join the party by getting out your binoculars or telescopes and meet me for more in the backyard...

OPT Named a DiversityBusiness Award-Winner

OPT has distinguished itself as one of the top small businesses in the country by being recognized among the 2 million companies registered in DiversityBusiness.com's directory in three categories; Top 500 Diversity Owned businesses in the United States, Top 500 privately held businesses in the United States, and Top 100 Diversity Owned businesses in California. For 12 years, DiversityBusiness.com has collected and compiled these lists on a state and national basis, and OPT is immensely proud to be included on them.

About DiversityBusiness: Launched in 1999, DiversityBusiness, with over 250,000 members, is the largest organization of diversity owned businesses throughout the United States that provide goods and services to Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, and colleges and universities. DiversityBusiness provides research and data collection services for diversity including the "Top 50 Organizations for Multicultural Business Opportunities", "Top 500 Diversity Owned Companies in America", and others. Its research has been recognized and published by Forbes Magazine, Business Week and thousands of other print and internet publications. The site has gained national recognition and has won numerous awards for its content and design.

FourStar Service: Red Galaxy Cluster Hides In Plain Sight

An infared image of the cluster. Three narrow slices of the infrared spectrum are represented in this color composite. The colors have been balanced to accentuate the red galaxies at a distance of 10.5 billion light years. Credit: FourStar Galaxy Evolution Survey ("Z-FOURGE") Click to open animation in a new window.

Located some 10.5 billion light years away in the general direction of the constellation of Leo, the most distant cluster of red galaxies so far discovered has been hiding in plain sight... until now. Thanks to the advanced observing techniques of FourStar, a new and powerful near-infrared camera on the 6.5m Magellan Baade Telescope, we're now able to peer beyond faint and into the realm of the faintest. It's 30 galaxies packed like sardines in a tin and their formation is the earliest known “galaxy city” in the Universe!

Weekly SkyWatcher's Forecast: March 5-11, 2012

Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! Our week begins with the dance of the planets and a gathering of asteroids. Keep watching as Mars makes its closest approach of the year - while Venus and Jupiter continue to get nearer. Celebrate the Full Worm Moon, interesting stars and beautful galaxies and clusters! Dust off those binoculars and telescopes and meet me in the backyard, because... Here's what's up!

Life in the Universe, Reflected by the Moon

This view shows the thin crescent Moon setting over ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Credit: ESO/B. Tafreshi/TWAN

Earthshine – a poetic, fanciful word for the soft, faint glow on the Moon when the light from the Sun is reflected from the Earth's surface, onto the dark part of the Moon. And as unlikely as it might seem, astronomers have used Earthshine to verify there’s life in the Universe: Us. While we already know about life on our own world, this technique validates that faint light from distant worlds could also be used to find potential alien life.

“We used a trick called earthshine observation to look at the Earth as if it were an exoplanet,” said Michael Sterzik from the European Southern Observatory. “The Sun shines on the Earth and this light is reflected back to the surface of the Moon. The lunar surface acts as a giant mirror and reflects the Earth’s light back to us — and this is what we have observed with the VLT (Very Large Telescope).”