Featured series 
Tag: Harvard College Observatory
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Nation & World
‘Scale’ tells the story of how, and what, we measure
A cross-disciplinary exhibit at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture uses a wide array of artifacts to examine the role of “Scale.”
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Nation & World
Light years ahead
Q&A with Dava Sobel, whose new book “The Glass Universe” explores pioneering work by female analysts at the Harvard College Observatory.
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Nation & World
Guardians of the sky
After a flood threatened to destroy the Harvard College Observatory’s trove of glass plate negatives, staff members and students from around the University showed up to help move the plates to safety.
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Nation & World
Eight new planets found in Goldilocks Zone
Astronomers announced Tuesday that they have found eight new planets in the Goldilocks Zone of their stars, orbiting at a distance where liquid water can exist on the planet’s surface. The discoveries double the number of small planets believed to be in the habitable zone of their parent stars.
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Nation & World
Can iPads help students learn science? Yes
A new study by researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shows that students grasp the unimaginable emptiness of space more effectively when they use iPads to explore 3-D simulations of the universe, compared with traditional classroom instruction.
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Nation & World
A clarion call for science
Harvard President Drew Faust called for the scientific community to unite in its efforts to press Congress for continued federal research support during a speech to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Nation & World
Margaret Nast Lewis, 101, dies
Margaret Nast Lewis, a former faculty member of the Harvard College Observatory, died in Cambridge on Nov. 23 at the age of 101.
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Nation & World
Good day, moons
CfA fellow David Kipping is heading a hunt for astronomical bodies at the edge of our ability to detect them: moons circling planets in other solar systems.
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Nation & World
Re-creating a slice of the universe
Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and their colleagues at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies have made it possible to build a universe from scratch.
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Nation & World
The last dance between Venus and the sun
Before 2004, the most recent Venus transit occurred more than a century ago, in 1882, and was used to compute the distance from the Earth to the sun. On June 5, 2012, another Venus transit will occur. Scientists with NASA’s Kepler mission hope to discover Earth-like planets outside our solar system by searching for transits…
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Nation & World
America’s first time zone
The Harvard College Observatory built its foundation in the mid-1800s, after an epidemic of train wrecks prompted the railroads to seek a regional standard for greater accuracy and safety.
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Nation & World
Bright idea
In a new paper, Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Edwin Turner of Princeton University suggest a new technique for finding aliens: Look for their city lights.
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Nation & World
New views of the cosmos
Though it won’t be completed until 2013, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a radio telescope observatory under construction in northern Chile, is already the most powerful and complex such facility ever built, and four astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics are among those first in line to use it.
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Nation & World
The gifts of immigration
Two Harvard researchers say that new U.S. residents, most of whom are young and nonwhite, reflect not just policy challenges, but an immense reservoir of social potential.
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Nation & World
Administrator by day, singer by night
Karen Woodward Massey, director of education and outreach at FAS Research Administration Services (RAS), has always needed a creative outlet from her “right-brain” work. From ingénue roles to a staff cover band, the Grateful Deadlines, one thing remains the same: She has a ton of fun along the way.
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Nation & World
Building a stellar time machine
Harvard researchers are building a celestial time machine that lets astronomers look back at hundreds of thousands of objects in the Earth’s skies over the past century.
