CCSF Astronomy Department

03/16/2026

05/29/2025

Astronomers are puzzled by the silence over an instrument that could briefly reign as world’s biggest

09/20/2022

Maarten Schmidt, known for his 1963 discovery of quasars, has passed away.

02/24/2021

Right now..

With thousands of known exoplanets, many as small as the Earth, our detection capabilities are beginning to border on that necessary to detect the largest moons found in our solar system. Exomoons would offer new opportunities to understand the origins of planetary systems, as well as potentially pl...

02/24/2021

MARS Virtual Tour - What's Mars surface looks like to you?
NASA’s Perseverance Navcams 360° photo (edited by Hugh Hou )

How to experience this in your Oculus VR headset:
1. Save this post (Add this to your “Saved Items”)
2. Save it on a list
3. Put on your Oculus Quest 2 / Quest 1 VR headset. On the left side of your Oculus homepage menu, click on “Saved”
4. You should be able to see your saved Mars 360 photo
5. Click on “Watch” and it will open an Oculus Browser
6. The 360 photo will load
7. On the top left corner of the photo, you will see the “Enter VR” button
8. Click “Enter VR” and it will go into a full immersive view of the Mars 360 photo
Alternatively, you can copy the Facebook post’s URL and open your Oculus Browser on your Quest 1 or Quest 2 VR headset, and view it directly.
I hope you can enjoy this unique experience in immersive virtual reality!

From NASA - This panorama, taken on Feb. 20, 2021, by the Navigation Cameras, or Navcams, aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover, was stitched together from six individual images after they were sent back to Earth.

Disclaimer: the original photo does not have the full sky, I edited the sky to have a full 360 experience inside a VR headset like Oculus Quest 2. The sky does not represent the real sky from Mars.

Credit
NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory NASA's Perseverance Mars Rover

02/18/2021

Today at 11:15 AM, Perseverance Mars Rover Landing Live Broadcast

Watch an epic journey unfold on Thursday, Feb. 18 as our Perseverance rover lands on Mars. To reach the surface of the Red Planet, the rover has to survive t...

02/09/2021

Wednesday 2/10 at Noon PST.

The standard LCDM model gives a successful description of many astrophysical observations. However, many fundamental questions remained unanswered. I will focus on two of them and show how strong gravitational lensing can help us answer them in a powerful way, independent of all other probes. The fi...

02/05/2021

The US Postal Service has revealed a new stamp design honoring Chien-Shiung Wu, a Chinese-American experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the field of nuclear physics.Wu, who was born and raised in China, came to America at the age of 24 and studied at the University of Califor...

01/29/2021

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01/19/2021

Having a complete quantum theory of gravity has long been a major goal of theoretical physics. This is because a naive merger of quantum mechanics and general relativity---though it works in certain limited regimes---suffers from major theoretical problems. A particularly acute one arises when one c...