The WISE will be in orbit for the next nine months, snapping a photo every 11 seconds to map the entire universe in infrared. Eventually it'll cover the entire sky 1.5 times over.

It'll be looking for any objects that have a potential of hitting Earth as well as distant objects such as brown dwarfs and far-away galaxies shrouded in dust. Also, alien spacecraft. I mean, duh. [CNN, image via]

Slooh controls a global network of mountain top telescopes located in Chile, Australia, and Europe, offering 24 hour views of the night sky. The coolest part is that the images seen on your computer screen are captured live, rather than taken by someone else a while ago. You're able to zoom in and learn about the celestial bodies encountered during each mission.

150 minutes of space time costs only about $15. And since you can't afford a multi-million dollar rocketship ride into space, this is definitely the ticket to get closer to the stars. [SLOOH Press Release]

The Hubble Telescope has taken countless stunning, amazing pictures of deep space since entering orbit. Check out a few of our favorites in the gallery below, and the official Hubble site for tons more. [Hubble Site via Wired]

The ISS will be visible to North American sky-watchers in mid- to late-March, and is so huge that it's as visible as Venus. These solar wings, priced at nearly $300 million, will just about double the ISS's capacity to perform scientific experiments (that is, if they're not too busy with their March Madness brackets), and give enough energy to allow for double the full-time crew members, from three to six. It takes about a full five minutes to slide across the night sky, which is plenty of time to get an amateur telescope all situated. If anyone has a capable setup, we'd love to hear how much detail can be seen. [Space Travel and Space.com]

The collision has sent more than 600 pieces of debris whizzing around the Earth at 17,500 mph. At those speeds, shards can take out a spacecraft (and you don't even want to think about what it could do to astronauts on a spacewalk). NASA has calculated the chance of a catastrophic impact at around 1 in 185—just below their 1 in 200 threshold. A decision on whether or not to progress with the Hubble repair mission in May is expected to come down within the next week or two. [Discovery via Wired]

Surprisingly, the replacement SIC&DH, which will undergo extensive testing starting in mid-December, will be constructed from hardware of the same vintage as the hilariously old version that keeps flipping out in space right now. Whatever works, I guess.

Even by Hubble standards, the latest picture is pretty amazing. As much I'd like to start off on a some kind of Saganesque soliloquy about sand, whales and the vastness of space, I can't because this picture looks exactly like every third Starfox 64 level. Seriously NASA, are you playing some kind of trick on us? Is the Hubble really OK? Is space even real? [NASA via The Register]

The LSST isn't slated to open up shop until 2016, but when it does, it'll record a whopping 30TB of data a night by aiming itself into the sky and recording what it sees. It'll be used to "trace billions of remote galaxies and measure the distortions in their shapes produced by lumps of Dark Matter, providing multiple tests of the mysterious Dark Energy."

What's more impressive is the setup they'll need to get all that data recorded. Check it:

* the Mountain/Base facility, which does initial data reduction and alert generation on a 25 TFLOPS Linux cluster with 60PB of storage (in year 10 of the survey)
* a 2.5 Gbps network that transfers the data from Chile (where the telescope itself will be based) to the U.S. and within the US
* the Archive Center, which re-reduces the data and produces annual data releases on a 250 TFLOPS Linux cluster and 60PB of storage (in year 10 of the survey)
* the Data Access Centers which provide access to all of the data products as well as 45 TFLOPS and 12 Petabytes of end user available computing and storage.

Pretty amazing stuff. [The Register]

World War Two vet Levchenko built the scope from scratch with his bare hands in the 70s—the rickety tower, the assemblies for the 16-inch lens, everything. Since his death in 2002, neighbors have had to fend off scrap metal collectors and salvagers from wrecking the thing as it lay dormant next to Levchenko's cabbage field. Since western Siberia will be a prime viewing spot for the eclipse in August, neighbors are hoping to restore it in time. Best of luck, as anything that can pry a bottle out of an old Russian drunk's hands has got to be pretty damn impressive. [Reuters]

The improved array, brilliantly named the Expanded Very Large Array, is now halfway done and well on its way to completion in 2012. Each of the 28 dish antennas will eventually be able to collect eight simultaneous two gigahertz streams, giving the facility ten times greater power than before. The EVLA will be used to study star formation, supernovae, and black holes. Though the price is a cool $94 million, that's less than the cost of 190 neat wristwatches. [SciAm via /.]

When complete, the $900 million Atacama Large Millimeter Array will be able to see some of the first galaxies formed after the big bang, or just get excellent television reception. [BBC]

Perched atop a 2,400-meter peak on the island, the GCT's 34-ft wide mirror is made up of 36 separate mirrors, and its all-seeing eye will be trained on the skies in the hope of finding planets similar to ours, as well recording the birth of new stars and studying black holes.

Project manager is Pedro Alvarez. "The GCT will observe things that are so small, or so very far off, that only a small amount of light reaches us," he said. "It will also see closer objects that either do not emit their own light or emit very little light. You need the biggest possible light-collecting surface to be able to see them."

[GCT via Guardian Unlimited]

The scope has 7x magnification and can record at 30fps in 320x240 resolution. Perfect for incriminating evidence on what Mrs. Olsen's been doing to Mr. Sandoval's Petunias. – Jason Chen

Product Page [Brando via i4u via uber gizmo]

If you really need some up-close-and-personal shots using a cellphone camera, Brando of Hong Kong offers its 6x telephoto attachment that works with certain Nokia 6000- and 7000- series cellphones.

The lens is held in place by a replacement battery door, and then you focus the lens using the view screen of the cellphone. If you think your cellphone camera shots look crappy now, wait until you try holding this still. Good luck. It's $19. – Charlie White

Product page [Brando]