Articles about the CHARA Array and by CHARA authors that have been published in the popular press. See our list of science press releases and announcements.
Articles in Newspapers and Magazines
- RW Cephei, a King of Kings
Tim Lyster, AAVSO Blog (December 2024) - Selections from 2024: Weighing the North Star
Kerry Hensley, AAS Nova (December 16, 2024) - New data from an array of telescopes has enabled astronomers to visualize the surface of the North Star, Polaris.
Colin Stuart, Sky & Telescope (August 28, 2024) - Scientists collect high-resolution images of the North Star's surface for 1st time
Monisha Ravisetti, Space.com (August 21, 2024) - The North Star is much heavier than previously thought
Ken Croswell, Science News (July 25, 2024) - Searching for Spots with Interferometry
Tarini Konchady, AAS Nova (Jun, 23 2021) - Seeing Stars
Christopher Crockett, Sky & Telescope (Nov. 2020) - Telescope array will spy on spy satellites, star surfaces, and black holes
Adam Mann, Science (Jul. 3, 2018) - Advances to dramatically improve astronomical interferometry in the next decade
Michelle Creech-Eakman, Gerard van Belle, and Theo ten Brummelaar, Laser Focus World (Jun. 1, 2018) - Stellar Snapshots
Amy Tyndall, Astronomy Now (Apr. 2018) - Seeing Stars
Corey S. Powell, Discover Magazine (Mar. 9, 2017) - SPACE WEATHER: How it affects us here on earth
Glenn Burns, WSB-TV2, Altanta, GA (Nov. 4, 2016) - Watching Stars Explode From Mount Wilson
Gail Schaefer, Zocalo Public Square (Dec. 17, 2014) - Fireball in space: Astronomers capture images of a star going nova
Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times (Oct. 27, 2014) - Probing a centuries-old mystery in the stars
Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times (Jan. 20, 2011) - Probing stars with optical and near-IR interferometry
Theo ten Brummelaar, Michelle Creech-Eakman, and John Monnier, Physics Today, 62, 28 (Jun. 1, 2009)
Books by CHARA Authors
- Sunward Passage by Harold McAlister, the first Director of CHARA. He is not only a fine and inspiring scientist, but also an author of two enjoyable books that are now available.
Walker Ransom, a forty-ish astronomer who lost his young wife in a car accident while still in graduate school, teaches at a small college in western North Carolina and lives with his Airedale terrier in a cabin on Clickrattle Creek. A specialist in the study of comets, he is plucked off the mountainous summit of Kitt Peak Observatory in southwest Arizona in the middle of a miserably unsuccessful observing run and taken under protective custody by uniformed troops to Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. He learns that an old colleague of his in the former East Germany, Joachim Schmidtler, has been found under the red light of a darkroom nearly afloat in a black pool of his own blood. Schmidtler’s dying words to his wife caution her to protect the “secret library” and warn that only one astronomer – Walker Ransom – can now “determine the elements.”
Ransom embarks on a two-week chase against time to decipher Schmidtler's cryptic words only to come full circle back to his own scientific quest. With the assistance of Kitt Peak staffers Alyssa Kennedy and Paul Collins and pseudo-cowboy Duke Wayne, Ransom's team sniffs out leads in Germany that eventually take them to the Big Island of Hawaii where all the pieces of the puzzle come together under potentially apocalyptic circumstances. - Policing Greene: A Policman at the Sunset of the Jim Crow South by Harold McAlister.
In 1964 at age 48, Carlton Lewis took an abrupt turn in life to become a policeman in a rural Southern county – half white, half black – that must cope with new federal civil rights laws. He was a roughneck Son of the South whose grandfather owned slaves. How would he perform in his new role? Would he treat all Greene County citizens fairly and equally regardless of their color? This is the true and often hair-raising story of an exceptional and fearless police officer who never shied away from a fight while seeking fair and equal justice at a turning point in U.S. history. - Diary of a Fire: The Station Fire Threat to Mount Wilson Observatory by Harold McAlister.
The Station Fire, the largest fire in the history of Los Angeles County, threatened historic Mount Wilson Observatory from 26 August until 25 September 2009. Initial predictions were that the fire would sweep the Observatory grounds, obliterating the site where Edwin Hubble revealed a vast and expanding Universe in the 1920s.