We are pleased to announce that this year the Arecibo and Green Bank Observatories are organizing the 2019 GBO/AO single dish and observer training workshop which will be held August 19-29th at the Green Bank Observatory, WV. The goal of the workshop is to provide participants with an in-depth knowledge on the fundamentals of single-dish radio astronomy, interferometry, instrumentation and associated techniques.

Dr. Alex Wolszczan, who is a professor at Penn State and a long-term user, visited the Arecibo Observatory during the week of March 4th, 2019 as part of an observing campaign to search for radio emission from cool brown dwarfs.

During this visit, Alex spoke about the possibility of detecting such planets via flaring radio emission and about detecting planets around pulsars through precision timing. He also talked about Jupiter-Io like emission from compact planetary systems, and plans to search for such flaring events from low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, and white dwarfs. Read More

Team radar from across several institutions were busy this month observing many targets of interest, including Comet 46P/Wirtanen, near-Earth asteroid 2003 SD220, and 7 other NEAs. The cross-institution teams used the NASA-funded Arecibo S-band planetary radar to study these objects in order to measure their astrometry, size, and characterize their surfaces. Read More

In 1974, the Arecibo Observatory made history by beaming the most powerful radio message into deep space ever made. The famous Arecibo Message was designed by the AO 74’s staff, led by Frank Drake, and with the help of the astronomer and famed science communicator Carl Sagan. It contained information about the human race and was intended to be our intergalactic calling card. Read More