We've seen home automation touchpanels used for some -- shall we say, unorthodox -- activities, but this is taking things to another level galaxy. Franklin, NC-based Dan Quigley has whipped up a way for his WiFi-enabled Crestron TMPC8X to actually control a giant telescope. Rather than manually getting the 'scope into the right position, he simply touches a button and watches it automatically check to see "if and when that object is viewable." While he's at it, he can dim the lights around him and check the local weather, and once a celestial body is in view, he can snap a photograph or have the system channel the image to any computer / TV. Suddenly, astronomy has become entirely more attractive.

[Thanks, Chuck]

The currently terrestrial Bill Gates and his former (and space-faring) Microsoft colleague, Charles Simonyi, have donated a cool $30m to a project that aims to build "the world's largest survey telescope" (cleverly) called the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. On Thursday, the group said that Gates and Simonyi had donated $10m and $20m respectively to help develop the telescope, which Gates says "is truly an Internet telescope, which will put terabytes of data each night into the hands of anyone that wants to explore." The 8.4-meter telescope, which sports three large mirrors and three refractive lenses, will be built on a mountain in northern Chile and is scheduled to decimate the magic of your astronomy club in 2014.

We've seen some far-out personal astronomy devices, but this mechanical "planetarium" from Richard Mille is also one of the most intricate pieces of clockwork we've ever come across. The model, which took 10 years to develop, displays the time, date, signs of the zodiac, phases of the moon, and relative placement of the planets in the solar system, and runs for 15 days once its spring windings are fully tightened. No word on price, but since Mille handbuilt just one of these, we're guessing "not cheap" would be a strong first guess.

[Via Watch Luxus]

Roger Angel's idea to launch a 100-meter liquid mirror telescope on the moon is far from the only mammoth-sized dream that could be headed into space, and if the feasibility study shows enough promise, it just might happen. The University of Arizona astronomer mentioned that the idea of putting an "enormous liquid-mirror telescope on the moon that could be hundreds of times more sensitive than the Hubble Space Telescope" had been around awhile, but apparently it's finally getting the attention it deserves. If constructed, it would easily be the largest ever built, and would reportedly allow scientists to "study the oldest and most distant objects in the universe, including the very first stars." The project is being investigated on behalf of NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts, and while these type devices are "relatively cheap" to build, it should be noted that it's being compared (at least financially) to the $4.5 billion James Webb Space Telescope. Now, where's the signup sheet for freelance contractors to get in on the moon-based build process?

[Via Wired]

When you've got folks dreaming up such things as a $2.5 trillion "space sunshade," we reckon a Star Trek-style deflector shield isn't too far-fetched. Apparently, a team of British scientists are looking into the possibility of crafting such a device in order to " protect astronauts from radiation" when they venture beyond the Earth's protective magnetic envelope, or "magnetosphere." Reportedly, the team is hoping to "to mimic the magnetic field which protects the Earth" and deploy the shields "around spacecraft and on the surfaces of planets to deflect harmful energetic particles." As nation's begin to revive plans of space exploration, the homegrown shield should look mighty attractive at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting, but details concerning a proposed launch date, and moreover, the presumably lofty pricetag, have yet to emerge.

[Via Slashdot]

It may not let you take deep space photographs, but Meade's new mySKY Personal Planetarium should help to give you a better sense of your cosmic environs, and also double as a suitable ray gun prop in your next no-budget sci-fi movie. To keep things simple, Meade's thankfully packed some GPS capabilities into the device, which should keep it properly aligned at all times with no input needed from you. Those GPS capabilities can also be extended to any Meade AutoStar-enabled telescope, with the mySKY doubling as a control unit for the telescope. In either configuartion, the device will let you find and identify more than 30,000 astronomical objects, displaying all the relevant information on its 480 x 234 LCD. You'll need to be fairly serious about your backyard astronomy to consider one of these though, with it set to demand a hefty $400 when it's released next month.

Don't expect to see one of these in a commercial DSLR anytime soon (especially now that Mamiya has left the game), but a division of DALSA Semiconductor has successfully manufactured and delivered a 111 megapixel image sensor that's only been topped on these pages by the 500 megapixel monster inside Fermilab's Dark Energy Camera. Putting even the highest-resolution bacteria-based cam to shame, the new 4-inch-square CCD features an array of 10,560 x 10,560 pixels, and was developed in conjunction with Semiconductor Technology Associates to aid the U.S. Naval Observatory's Astrometry Department in precisely determining the position and motion of celestial objects. While you probably can't afford to hire DALSA to build another one of these just for you, there's at least one option on the market that will give you the hundred-plus megapixel bragging rights you seek without breaking the bank: Better Light's 144 megapixel E-HS medium format backing, which, while technically only capturing 48 megapixels per color (and taking at least 66 seconds to do so), should still be enough to impress even your EOS 1Ds Mark II-sporting friends.

In a breakthrough that could benefit fields as diverse as networking, photography, astronomy, and peeping, science-types at Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research have unveiled their prototype of a glass-like material that they claim to be 100% transparent. Unlike normal glass, which reflects some of the incoming light, the new so-called metamaterial --composed of a grid of gold or silver nanocoils embedded in a prism-shaped, glass-like material -- uses its unique structural properties to achieve a negative refractive index, or complete transparency. Although currently just a one-off proof-of-concept (pictured, under an electron microscope), mass-produced versions of the new material could improve fiber optic communications, contribute to better telescopes and cameras, or lead to the development of completely new optical equipment.