Archive for January, 2006

The Future of Astronomy, as suggested by the National Science Foundation

Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 04:54 AM

Where are the baryons?How common are habitable planetary systems, how do they form and are we alone?When did the first stars form, what is the star formation history, and how do stars end their lives?How do supermassive black holes form?… These are big questions can be matched by power tools:Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, GLAST, JDEM, JWST, and Con-XOn the ground: Kecks, Gemini, and MagellanAdvanced instrumentation from adaptive optics and high resolution spectroscopy to multi-object spectrographs, big radio ears from VLA, Arecibo, ALMA, CMB detectors, neutrino, gamma, particle accelerators.”Astronomy is a great stimulus for many people.

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Michael Griffin, head of NASA, announces a Hubble Servicing Mission may be possible

Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 11:04 AM

As many astronomers have lamented, the Columbia disaster led to then NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe to cancel a servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope as “too dangerous” despite the fact that many astronauts were willing to engage in the mission and that without the mission hubble would become unusable in the next few years. [...]

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AAS Tuesday Morning

Tuesday, January 10th, 2006 at 06:21 AM

I walked around the poster session floor and picked up pairs of toys for my twins (foam stars, light up keychains, rulers from the U.S. Naval observatory, informing you that light travels one foot in a nanosecond, and my favorite, LED pens which light up as you write.In addition to collecting knick-knacks, I spent a lot of time looking at posters. Some of the more memorable posters were a poster by a Midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy, Eric Roe, announcing the discovery of a large Kuiper Belt Object in the outer solar system (not as large as Pluto, but respectable).some images of Earth’s Moon shot by Hubble,A poster by Brian Thomas of Washburn University and on the effects on Earth of a Supernova going off within 30 parsecs, in a nutshell, kiss the ozone layer goodbye.An amazing image of the Magellanic Clouds, the satellite galaxies orbiting earth, constructed from a mosaic of Well its Tuesday morning and I have placed my poster up and I am now waiting for the first talk of the morning.

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Live Blogging from the AAS Meeting in DC

Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 at 10:41 PM

Usually at least a half dozen to dozen astronomical discoveries manage to make it out of this meeting into the “general” press, however, you should be aware that well over 2000 astronomers will be there and the range of research being presented is huge (just check out the list of “sessions” here to see a break down of the research presented)…. We are both bringing laptops and assuming the wireless access doesn’t become spotty like this past summer’s meeting, we hope to be live blogging about the astronomical discoveries announced during at the meeting.

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