After spending billion of years twinkling and shining, some stars in the heavens appear to "dance" as they wind down. Now, for the next 14 days, the Whole Earth Telescope, an international network of cooperating astronomical observatories led by the University of Delaware, will be continuously monitoring three of these stars to try to figure out what's going on inside their luminous masses of cooling plasma. The primary target is a white dwarf star known as GD358 in the constellation Hercules. Read more
Astronomers Harry Shipman and Rob Lancaster stay up all night, watching the telescope at Mt. Cuba Observatory as it watches the sky. Thousands of miles away, in Texas and Arizona, professional and amateur observers are doing the same thing, using a camera attached to a telescope to take thousands of images of the same group of white dwarf stars. When the sun comes up, teams in New Zealand, Australia and China take over. Astronomers in Russia, South Africa, the Canary Islands and other points on the globe all take a turn before the cycle begins again. Read more