Astronomical instruments

Three hundred years ago the Royal Observatory began to take astronomical measurements of the stars.

The Greek astronomer Hipparchos divided naked-eye stars into six brightness classes.

Many of the atoms from which our bodies are made were once, thousands of millions of years ago, deep in the interior of one of many stars.

The size of the telescope that we use determines how much detail we can see with it and how bright the image looks.

The Hubble Space Telescope established that the Cygnus Loop supernova may have exploded just 5000 years ago.

On 3 September 2000, the Telescope YEPUN successfully achieved 'First Light'.

The Gemini project enables astronomers to have coverage of the entire sky from the North Pole to the South.

Astronomers have obtained the sharpest-ever images taken with an Earth-based telescope.

New images from NASA's Chandra orbiting X-ray observatory show strong evidence for a pulsar in the supernova remnant G292.0+1.8.

In 2001 the Gemini North telescope obtained a striking image of gas being expelled from a young massive star.

In 1999 the Gemini telescope was pointed at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.

An adaptive optics system was used in 2001 to obtain images comparable to the quality of those of the Hubble Space Telescope.

In 1999 European astronomers used an optical detector to measure colour and intensity changes in a binary star for the first time.

In 2002 the most distant group of galaxies was discovered about 13.5 billion light-years away from our Milky Way galaxy.

In 2003 astronomers discovered the bright, hot, star-forming region known as the Lynx arc.

In 2004 the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the most distant and oldest galaxies seen to that date.

Astronomers have found more than 500 galaxies that formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

The supernova remnant RCW103 was discovered in 2006. It originated in the colossal explosion of a star as a supernova about 2000 years ago.