Three of the most luminous supernovae on record — 2006gy, 2005gj, and 2005ap — pose problems for theorists. For example, 2006gy’s peak luminosity reached 50 billion Suns. That’s 10 times brighter than the average type Ia supernova and 100 times brighter than a representative type II. And 2005ap was 2 times brighter still. What’s a theorist to do? In our January issue, I noted that astronomers suspected some of these events might be so-called “pair...

There’s no better place to find astronomy related software than the web archive created by Astro Events Group of Ostend, Belgium. “Our compilation will actually never be complete,” says Patrick Jaecques, a member of the group. “We have updates about every week. It’s also the only part of our Dutch web site that is translated into French, German and English.” There you’ll find hundreds of programs for a wide variety of computing environments, including...

I was checking out the exhibitors at this week’s American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas, and trying hard to avoid information overload. The booth for the Pan-STARRS project stopped me in mid-stride. In fact, I may have actually done a double-take. There, a giant poster of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) formed the booth’s backdrop. Only this wasn’t a poster. It was an image taken with the 1.4-billion-pixel charge-coupled-device camera on...