I'm a science writer and editor. I work with clients in the observatory and planetarium community, as well as my own book, web, planetarium, and other projects.
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So, all this astronomy I write about costs money to do. That isn't a surprise to anybody, I hope. Everything in life has some cost to it, whether in money, karma, time, personal involvement, or ethical reward. While it is true that you can walk outside, look up, and do astronomy at the very basic level, to do anything beyond that requires equipment and person-hours. And those cost money.
Amateur astronomy equipment can cost as little as the price of a book of star maps and a pair of 10x50 binoculars or run to many thousands of dollars or Euros or whatever units of money you use for a top-of-the-line home observatory. I always tell people to start small and let the love of astronomy guide them to whatever seems appropriate to spend.
Professional astronomy is a whole different ball game. No one person "owns" a big observatory like Yerkes or Anglo-Australian or Mt. Wilson or Gemini or Hubble Space Telescope or the Very Large Array. They're operated by consortiums of institutions based in a number of countries. It's about the only way that the enormous costs of running state-of-the-art astrophysical research facilities can be afforded. And the costs can be ... well... astronomical, running into multiple millions of dollars/Euros/etc. each year. The consortiums (and their countries) help pay the bills, and in return, each member of the consortium gets time on the instrument(s).
Recently the Gemini partnership was shaken when the United Kingdom announced it was pulling out to save money. I don't know all the politics that led to this decision, but it took UK astronomers by surprise. The result of that pullout would have denied UK astronomers access to a major Northern Hemisphere observatory, starting nearly immediately.
It made little sense, but in times of tightening budgets, I suppose that the science and technology committee in the UK that made this decision didn't see astronomy as being as important as other physics expenditures it wanted to make, or perhaps much less important than life sciences, for example. Nonetheless, it was a surprise to the partnership and a shock to the world's astronomy community.
Today the Royal Astronomical Society announced that the UK is in "constructive discussions" to continue UK involvement in the Gemini Partnership. President of the RAS, Dr. Michael Rowan-Robinson commented, "The UK has invested about 35 million pounds in the capital phase of the Gemini Observatories, in which we have a 23% stake. To pull out precipitately, as seemed to be happening, would have written this off to make a saving of 4 million pounds a year, at the expense of inflicting great damage to the UK's international reputation."
That is a lot of money to invest, and UK astronomers had every right to feel betrayed by their government's actions in the attempted pullout. Astronomy IS worth the money and the effort, and I suspect that UK scientists will need to make sure their collective voice is heard the next time somebody suggests "cost-saving" measures such as this one.
My dad is a military veteran. He fought in the U.S. Army in the Korean War and was one of the lucky ones to come back alive. He was also the person who first got me started in astronomy, taking me out to look at the stars when I was probably just barely old enough to know what those lights in the sky were. He's always been fascinated with space and astronomy and has a couple of telescopes and I don't know how many books about the subjects. I can proudly say that if it wasn't for him, as well as my mom's push for me to get good grades (which I didn't always do) and be a reader (which I DID do), my own interest in astronomy might never have bloomed.
So, this one's for you, Daddy, on Veteran's Day—for coming home and making sure that I got bit by the star bug, and for being such a star-hopper yourself!
Veteran's Day is the U.S. variant on celebrations like Armistice Day or Remembrance Day in other countries. It's a time to thank the men and women who are in the armed services who have served their countries in times of peace AND war. Regardless of how you feel about war, soldiers (whether your own country's or those of other countries), the day is there to remember their service and sacrifices. It's a very human holiday and I can't think of any country in the world that doesn't owe at least some measure of thanks to those who served.
There's an interesting connection between war and astronomy. In the really olden days, war planners consulted the stars for propitious times to do battle. Why, they even had Mars—their very own god of war. Later on, the development of the telescope (while not strictly a military invention) allowed ship captains to spy out their adversaries at sea, and land-bound armies to see their enemies coming long before battle.
Today's astronomers (vet and non-vet alike) benefit from instruments that were developed for military use. These days, such things as adaptive optics and remote sensing are giving us unprecedented views of the cosmos. Those technologies were largely developed for military use (either during wartime or for "intelligence" purposes).
I kind of like to think that these technologies are transcending their warlike roots. At first they're used by people who are awarded stars for bravery and valor. Now, they're delivering the stars to everyone, a graceful and wonderful Veteran's Day/Remembrance Day gift.
Pulsars are big, nasty, radio-noisy beasts in the cosmic zoo. They are what's left over after a massive star (say one that is at least eight times more massive than the Sun) explodes as a supernova. Some of the star's body (what hasn't been blasted out to space) falls back in on itself in a seething mass of crushed neutrons. They're superdense and they spin. As they whip around many times per second, they send out beams of radio waves that sweep across our field of view like the light from a lighthouse. We catch their beams as pulses of radio waves; hence the name "pulsar."
A group of astronomers who study these strange stellar animals has put together a project for high school students and their teachers to participate in searching out pulsars in our galaxy. The students and educators will join astronomers on the cutting edge of science under a program to be operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and West Virginia University (WVU), and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The program, called the Pulsar Search Collaboratory, will engage West Virginia students and teachers in a massive search for new pulsars using data from the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT).The GBT has discovered more than 60 pulsars over the past five years, including the fastest-rotating pulsar ever found, a speedster spinning 716 times per second.
Student teams will receive parcels of data from the GBT and analyze the data to discover pulsars. To do this, they'll learn to use analysis software and recognize radio interference from Earth-based technologies that can contaminate the data. Each portion of the data will be analyzed by multiple teams. Of the 1,500 hours of GBT observing data in the project, all taken during the summer of 2007, some 300 hours is reserved for analysis by the student teams. This reserved data set is expected to include tens of new pulsars and about 100 known pulsars. It's highly possible that each student in the project could discover one of these cosmic beasts for themselves. Think of how THAT will look on a college application form!
The first step you take to space is the one you take when you go outside and look up at the stars. A lot of questions crowd your mind. How far away are those stars? is a good one. Another one that you eventually get to is: How did they form?
Astronomy, the science that studies the stars and planets and galaxies, is a rigorous way of looking at the stars and explaining how they came to be. It applies physics, which is another science that we all learn at some point in our lives. The laws of physics describe motions, actions, and reactions. Pretty simple, really. Something happens, a law of physics describes that happening. If you can observe it, you can describe it. If it happens often enough in the same or similar ways, the laws of physics describe it. That's the essence of science, and the application of physical laws. Clear thinking is required and it's not hard to do once you get the hang of it.
So, the stars are out there, and over centuries of study, we've figured out how they work, where they came from, and what they're going to do throughout their lives. Same with planets and galaxies and nebulae.
But, the first step is to go out there and gaze.
There's a project going on in the first two weeks of October called the Great World Wide Star Count. It's aimed at anybody who wants to go outside, look up at the stars, and then share what they see with others. It's a science project, and as such things go, it's pretty easy. You go outside, look for specific constellations and then come inside and write up what you see in a form on the World Wide Web. Visit the link to find out more. It's time to step outside to the stars! Start practicing for the Star Count tonight!
So, just to finish off the thoughts I started in the previous entry... writing for the dome requires that I conceive of my story in more than the square or rectangular dimensions that most of us are used to in movies and TV. But, there was also another constraint. For the longest time, we could only see the stars on the dome as a "flat" backdrop, much as we do when we step outside and stargaze. This isn't such a bad thing, especially if you want to teach people how to find various stars, constellations, planets, and so forth. But, with the advent of fulldome digital video, suddenly all the databases of stars that scientists work with could be plugged into a computer program and used to take people out through the stars. Add in more databases and suddenly you can travel through galaxy clusters and the large-scale structure of the cosmos. This is 'way more than we used to get in the old days of planetariums, when we were limited to slides of galaxy clusters, for example.
There is some ferment in the planetarium industry about the "old ways" going the way of the dinosaur. It's true. Slide projectors aren't being made by Kodak anymore; nor is much of the film we used to make our slides available. It's a digital video age, and as expensive as the changeover is for those places who are contemplating the leap to fulldome, it's also a leap into methods of doing our jobs that are much different from the "old days."
Today, a planetarian using fulldome video will find him or herself running shows from a variety of producers (such as myself), and likely also wanting to create some of his or her own presentations. All of us planetarium folk who create shows are finding ourselves learning new tricks of the trade: video editing and compositing software, graphics creation packages, and so on. Instead of slaving away over a hot copystand and photographing artwork to make panoramas and all-skies, we're all slaving away in front of computers and learning the true meaning of "babysitting a render" just like the big boys at Pixar and other studios.
So, what does this mean for me as a science writer? Basically, when I set out to write a show these days, I'm finally getting to see my shows on the dome the way I've always pictured them in my mind as I write them, thanks to advances in digital video technology and computerized visual editing and compositing.
There's another meteor shower coming up in a week, and if you didn't get enough of them with the Perseids, you should check this one out. It's called the Aurigids, and it's supposed to be a flurry of bright and oddly colored meteors that seem to come from the direction of the constellation Auriga.
There's quite a bit of interest in this year's shower, which is the debris from Comet Kiess (C/1911 N1), because it's a rare one. Comet Kiess has only visited this end of the solar system twice in the past couple of thousand years, and so Earth rarely encounters its debris tail. This year we'll plow right through that trail on September 1. And if we're lucky, there could (emphasis on the "could") be a nice meteor shower, with perhaps a hundred meteors per hour or more, if the debris stream is thick. Or, if the debris stream is thin, the shower could be a bust.
The catch here is that the peak of the shower will be best seen by people living in the Rocky Mountains and further west. Earth will be smack in the middle of this stream at 11:36 UT (that's 4:30 AM PDT). That's the peak time; the shower (if there is one) begins well before that.(See here and here for more information.)
If you are planning to watch for Aurigids, there's a unique project brewing that you might want to be involved with: the Aurigid Laptop Meteor Observation Project. Essentially, it's another distributed computing project that will take observation info sent in by people in the observing range of the shower and turn it into a three-dimensional map of the debris stream from Comet Kiess. If you've got the time, you're in the right place, and want to make a contribution to solar system science, here's your chance.
Just when you thought Google had covered just about everything here on Earth, they've come out with a cosmic exploration tool accessible through Google Earth. To get it you have to download and install the latest version of Google Earth 4.2 (available for PC, Mac, or Linux).
Laid out before you are stars, nebulae, and galaxies (including some of the most distant ones ever seen), all accessible through the same navigational tools as regular Google Earth. You also get constellations and a whole Backyard Astronomy layer, complete with images as seen by naked eye and telescopes. Hubble Space Telescope imagery, and two informative layers about the life of a star and the users guide to galaxies complete the opening set. I can imagine that once people get hold of this and play with it for a bit that there will be a blossoming of .kmz files (the overlays) out there for all kinds of tours and educational trips through the cosmos.
This is one of those times in the development of the internet and the World wide Web when I look back over how far we've come. The first computer I ever used was a mainframe that our high school had access to from a local research establishment. We programmed it in BASIC, although the advanced types could do FORTRAN or COBOL. The output? Paper printouts. The first computer I ever owned was an Osborne Executive that Mark and I bought in the early 1980s. My first modem followed shortly thereafter. The output? Paper printouts. On the screen it was all ASCII.
In record time we went from that tiny 128K machine to Kaypros and Dells, each one bringing us more and more capability for office apps, plus access to content on what was becoming the Internet. Today, almost a quarter century later, we're reaching out to the cosmos with Google and other accessible tools. The other night I was watching movies on my computer and had to stop and marvel for a second about how commonplace it all is now. But, 25 years ago, not so much. If anybody had told me then that I'd be accessing images from an orbiting space telescope, using my computer and a network to send my work to clients around the world, and exploring the distant cosmos with a program that made it as easy as a mouse click—well, I wouldn't have believed them.
For those of you who have grown up with the wonders of the Web and Internet at your fingertips, it's all as new as today. I think it's great and now I'm going to stop reminding myself about the distant past. The future's here folks. Enjoy!
Now, go download the new Google Earth and get to work exploring!
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Adot's Notblog A fellow traveler blogger and astronomy enthusiast!
Astronomy Blog An astronomy blog pondering the big questions
