Month: May 2024

Enlarge / The James Webb Space Telescope has captured the sharpest infrared images to date of one of the most distinctive objects in our skies, the Horsehead Nebula. (credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, K. Misselt (University of Arizona) and A. Abergel (IAS/University Paris-Saclay, CNRS))

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 1, and today's photo is ridiculously awesome. Taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, it features the sharpest infrared image of the Horsehead Nebula captured to date—it is so zoomed in we can only see the mane. Even so, the image covers an area that is nearly one light-year across, or about 7.6 trillion km.

The Horsehead Nebula is fairly close to Earth, as these things go, about 1,300 light-years. So, it is within our galaxy. In addition to the prominent star at the top of the image and a handful of other stars with six diffraction spikes, the rest of the objects in this image are distant galaxies.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Telecom provider CenturyLink left a couple in Oregon without landline phone service for two months, then sent a bill for $239.

CenturyLink customer Kirstin Appel and her husband live in Banks, a city with fewer than 2,000 residents in Oregon's Tualatin Valley. They keep a landline for emergencies because their only Internet service is satellite, and cellular service in the area is poor. Appel said they pay $41 a month for CenturyLink phone service.

CenturyLink phone service became spotty and intermittent around January 20 when winter storms hit the area and then went out completely on January 27, Appel told us. She contacted Ars nearly two months after the outage began, desperate for a fix because her various chats with CenturyLink customer service led nowhere.