An amateur astronomer with an eye for exploding stars in the night sky has celebrated the latest celestial discovery from his back garden with a cup of tea.
Dave Grennan, 42, hit the jackpot in the heavens over his suburban Dublin home on Good Friday using a telescope he built himself, which picked up a 170-million-year-old dying sun 100 times the size of ours.
“It was 11 o’clock at night when I actually got the first look at this and by 1am I was fairly certain and at that time of night there was nothing else for it but a strong cup of tea,” he said.
“What excites me about this one this time is the telescope – I built it myself, right down to the polishing of the lenses.”
Mr Grennan, a 9-to-5 software developer, has discovered three supernovae or exploding stars over four years from a shed at the bottom of his garden.
Mockingbird flies on to the web
Scout, Boo Radley and Atticus Finch are finally reaching the pixeled screen. To Kill a Mockingbird will be made available as an e-book and digital audiobook in July, filling one of the biggest gaps in the electronic library.
Author Harper Lee, 88, said in a rare statement issued through Harper Collins Publishers that, while she still favoured “dusty” books, she had signed on to make it available to a “new generation”.
Published in 1960, Harper Collins says the novel has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and still sells more than a million per year.
Google’s car in the driving seat
Google says it has turned a corner in its pursuit of a car that can drive itself. The leader of the technology giant’s driverless car project wrote in a blog post that test vehicles are becoming far more adept at city driving.
They can already comfortably handle motorways, he said, but city driving presents a virtual obstacle course of pedestrians, cyclists and blind corners.
Google says the cars can now negotiate thousands of urban situations that would have stumped them a year or two ago.
To navigate and avoid crashes, Google’s fleet of retrofitted Lexus SUVs relies on sensors such as lasers and radar. A driver is ready to take over if needed.
Reintroducing bison to Romania
Half a dozen rare European bison bred in captivity in the UK and Ireland have been sent to Romania to be reintroduced into the wild.
European bison were driven to extinction in the wild by the early 20th century as a result of hunting and destruction of their habitat, conservationists said.
Captive breeding programmes in European zoos and reintroductions have led to a gradual increase in numbers, and this project aims to establish a self-sustaining population and boost the variety of wildlife in the region. Reintroductions have already established herds in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and Slovakia.