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The Keck Observatory-Caltech NIRES team just completed the instrument’s first set of commissioning observations and achieved “first light” with a spectral image of the planetary nebula NGC 7027.

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Caltech is proceeding to decommission the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO) on Hawaii Island’s Maunakea. CSO began operations in 1987 and ceased scientific observations in September 2015.

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Often, comets are portrayed as harbingers of gloom and doom in movies and on television, but most pose no threat to Earth. Comet Elenin, the latest comet to visit our inner solar system, is no exception.

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MEDIA RELEASE Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and University of Hawaii (UH) have discovered 16 close-knit pairs of supermassive black holes in merging galaxies. The research findings, based on observations done at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, were presented in Seattle this week […]

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MEDIA RELEASE India’s Minister of Science and Technology Prithviraj Chavan has announced the decision to join the Thirty Meter Telescope Project (TMT) as an observer. TMT is the next-generation astronomical observatory that is scheduled to begin scientific operations in 2018 on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Observer status is the first step in becoming a full partner […]

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  MEDIA RELEASE   Caltech will begin decommissioning the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory (CSO) in Hawaii. Plans call for the dismantling of the observatory to begin in 2016, with the return of the site to its natural state by 2018. The decommissioning of the CSO is due to the construction of the next generation of radio […]

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