NICER identifies SGR 1830-0645 as a Magnetar (22 Oct 2020)
NICER observations clearly show that the recently discovered source SGR 1830-0645 is a magnetar with a magnetic field strength of about 3x10 gauss.

Chandra CALDB 4.9.3 installed at the HEASARC (16 Oct 2020)
The Chandra CalDB 4.9.3 is now installed and available at the HEASARC. Chandra 4.9.3 was released by the CXC on October 16, 2020. Note that CALDB 4.9.3 is compatible with CIAO 4.12 and later versions only.

INTEGRAL Operations Approved Through 2022 (15 Oct 2020)
ESA's Science Programme Committee (SPC) has confirmed the continued operation of INTEGRAL from January 1, 2021 through December 31, 2022. The decision was taken during the SPC meeting held October 1, 2020 following a comprehensive review.

NICER and NuSTAR observations of the Blazar BL Lac (15 Oct 2020)
NICER and NuSTAR obtained director's discretionary observations of the blazar BL Lac after its historical optical-to-gamma ray maximum. The NICER & NuSTAR spectrum can be fit with a broken power law, and these observations confirm the active state of the source.

Swift CALDB updated (10 Oct 2020)
The Swift Caldb has been updated for the UVOTA (update version 20201008). This update fixes a problem with caldb.indx20200925...

Update: SkyView hardware upgrade postponed (09 Oct 2020)
Update: The SkyView hardware upgrade has been postponed to Wednesday, October 21, at 1pm ET. At that time SkyView will be unavailable for approximately one hour and 15 minutes. We encountered some technical difficulties in transitioning to a new storage system – ... Continue reading ...