One night last February was unusually bright...apparently. It was because 440 million years ago a star, 20 times the size of our sun, had a preliminary explosion throwing gamma-rays all the way to Earth. This isn't, though, what fascinates me.
The way we know about it is because in November 2004, NASA launched the 'Swift' satellite. It's the ability of Swift to detect such an emission, locate it and spin itself around to focus all three of it's instruments on the star in order to record and relay all the data IN REAL TIME...in less than 20 seconds. That's so cool that we can build things like that! (Swift links: NASA Wikipedia; the original Wired story)
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