Visible light image: NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Here at Future-ish, we love astronomy and we love cocktails. So to prep our fans (and ourselves) for those stellar weekend cocktail conversations, we are pleased to offer our Cocktail Astronomy post each Friday.
This week in Cocktail Astronomy we bring you the glitz and glamour that accompanies any movie or gallery opening. In this case, it was the premier of ALMA and the stars were out in numbers, literally. Early in October 2011, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) located in Chile, the most powerful telescope of its kind to date, released its first image and the headliner of this show was none other than the stunning Antennae Galaxies in the Corvus constellation. What makes ALMA so specials is that rather than utilizing visible light or infrared imagery like many other telescopes, ALMA uses its multiple array to focus on long wavelengths of light. Given ALMA's unique perspective on the universe, we look forward to many more stellar snapshots in the future.