High flying astronomy with German instrument
Thursday, April 14, 2011 - 10:00
in Astronomy & Space
As the Jumbo touched down on the runway of the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale/California at 6.40 am local time it heralded in a new era for observational astronomy: it was April 6, 2011, and the jet which had been converted into the Sofia infrared observatory had just completed its first research flight with Great, the spectrometer developed by a team which included the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. The observation programme included the M 17 molecular cloud, a region of our galaxy with increased star formation, and also galaxy IC 342 only a few million light years away.