Observatory

When George Sauter moved to Carroll County from Columbia in 1998, he paid attention to the night sky for the first time. "I saw so many stars" that he had never seen before, he recalled. Sauter was so fascinated with the stars and planets that he asked his wife for a telescope. His attraction to the celestial bodies kept growing, and five years after moving to Carroll, Sauter, 42, became president of the Westminster Astronomical Society Inc. The society has been drawing amateur astronomers from the Baltimore area and educating the public about interplanetary sightings, constellations, stars and solar systems for 20 years.

The Westminster Astronomical Society wants to open up the night sky for Carroll County residents by building an observatory at Bear Branch Nature Center. Yesterday, the organization received preliminary support from the county commissioners to move forward on its plan. "It sounds like a great idea," said Commissioner Perry L. Jones Jr. The society's proposal calls for a 32-foot-by-32-foot observatory at the nature center outside Westminster. The building would be equipped with three telescopes and a retractable roof.

The trouble with cheap amateur telescopes is that you can't see much through them. Expensive telescopes really do bring the heavens into your back yard. But they're, well, really expensive. Mike Paolucci is betting that frustrated stargazers will spend $50 a year for access to a telescope bigger and better than anything they could ever hope to buy. Especially if it came with a guide, and they never had to stand in the cold to use it. Paolucci, 33, a self-described "serial entrepreneur" based in New York City, is preparing for a Christmas Day launch of Slooh.

NASA officials say a broken antenna motor is about to silence the $1 billion SOHO spacecraft, one of the world's most complex and successful solar observatories. The failure will cause a 19-day loss of signal once every three months. It will interrupt some scientific research and crimp the system that warns of approaching geomagnetic storms. Sweeping outward from the sun, these storms can damage satellites, endanger spacewalking astronauts and disrupt communications and power distribution on the ground.

Students at Glenelg Country School will soon be able to use a recent gift to explore worlds they may have seen only in textbooks. Yesterday evening, the school celebrated the opening of its new space observatory with a research-quality telescope. In 2000, three children of Kingdon and Mary Gould, who founded the school in 1954, donated the $35,000 instrument in their parents' name. Nearly three years later, Glenelg Country has completed two small structures to house the telescope on its campus in western Howard County.

In a significant step toward a new era in astronomy, NASA picked the company yesterday that will build the successor to the aging Hubble Space Telescope. TRW of Redondo Beach, Calif., won the $825 million contract to design and build the new space observatory, dubbed the James Webb Space Telescope after a former NASA chief. The telescope, expected to launch in 2010, was formerly known as the Next Generation Space Telescope. The Webb Space Telescope will search for cosmic clues to how the first stars and galaxies formed, events which are thought to have occurred only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

Scientists and engineers at the Johns Hopkins University say they have resumed limited scientific observations with an orbiting observatory that was idled Dec. 10 by failures in its pointing system. Controllers say they have reprogrammed a set of onboard electromagnets and harnessed them to help with aiming tasks they were never designed to do. The $108 million Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) is now steady enough for observations across almost half the sky, and controllers in Baltimore say they hope to regain access to nearly the entire sky in the coming months.

Trailblazing studies of the heavens by a Johns Hopkins-based orbiting observatory have been shut down by the failure of its pointing system. The $108 million Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer spacecraft was parked in a "safe" mode Dec. 10 after the second of four "reaction wheels" used to aim and hold the telescope on its targets stopped spinning, NASA said yesterday. Engineers in the FUSE control room in the physics department at Hopkins in Baltimore, aided by consultants brought in from across the country and recalled from retirement, have been working ever since to repair the problem or find an alternate solution.

Astronomers who chose their profession for the romance of cold, starry nights under an observatory dome may soon find they're making even more of their discoveries seated at their office computers. The National Science Foundation has launched a five-year, $10 million project to develop a National Virtual Observatory that will enable scientists, teachers and students to study the stars and galaxies at warp speed, by gazing into the vast data archives of the world's top observatories. "The same work could be done now, but it might take a scientist 10 years to reach a certain result," said Eileen Friel, who heads the science foundation's astronomy division.

WASHINGTON - Black holes, it turns out, are like cockroaches. You can't see them, but there are more out there than you can possibly imagine. Peering patiently through two seemingly empty gaps in the night sky with NASA's orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers at Johns Hopkins and Penn State universities have discovered the gaps are filled with swarms of objects glowing faintly in X-rays. Observers aiming powerful ground-based telescopes at the same places then confirmed that most of these feeble beacons are so far away that they had to be powered by massive black holes at the cores of distant galaxies.