September 12, 2008 - SkyandTelescope.com
Oh, how I wish the Hubble Space Telescope had been around in the 1840s. That's when a star in the southern constellation of Carina brightened dramatically and for a time became the second-brightest star in the nighttime sky.
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He tracked the nebula's outflow two ways. A spectrometer attached to the Gemini South 8-meter telescope high in the Chilean Andes recorded the movement of helium atoms, which have a strong infrared emission at 1.08 microns. Then, hopping over to the Blanco 4-meter telescope at nearby Cerro Tololo, he clocked velocities using Doppler shifts at deep-red wavelengths emitted by nitrogen-rich gas.
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