Unfortunately, the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast is in trouble due to a lack of funding and audio. (donation page at Astrosphere)

Right now, we are seeking the audio and funding needed to keep 365 Days of Astronomy going through December 2011. We seek commitments for 82 episodes and $5000 in funding. We would like our last episode to be December 31, 2011.

How we got here: When the 2009 International Year of Astronomy, came to an end, we decided to keep the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast going for two reasons: We had momentum and we knew the Year of the Solar System was coming. It was my (and I take the full blame here) belief that the Year of the Solar System would be able to carry much of the energy of IYA into the future, and that people passionate about our home star system would add their voices and donations to support 365 Days of Astronomy through this new celebration of space. This just didn’t happen though. Let’s face it, the economy sucks and many people are just tired. Finding the energy to donate time or money is hard when listening to the radio makes you want to hide under the bed.

Why we’re asking: At a certain level, it is hard to walk away from something feeling like it is halfway done. This is the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, and we’d like to complete the 2011 calendar year.

Can you help?
We want your audio! You can signup to produce an episode by emailing signup@365DaysofAstronomy.org

We need financial help. 365 Days of Astronomy is a product of Astrosphere New Media, a 501(c)3 non-profit. Your donations are tax-deductible in the US, and appreciated no matter where you come from. You can donate via paypal:

Please help?

UPDATED: You can also become a Sustaining Supporter of 365 Days of Astronomy  We have set up three ways to become a sustaining supporter of 365 Days of Astronomy. You can donate: $1 / week, $1 / day, or the equivalent of 5 Caffe Latte’s a week at Starbucks. All subscriptions are 5 months in duration.

Dollar a Week : $1.00USD – weekly Dollar a Day : $30.42USD – monthly Donate Coffee Money : $68.25USD – monthly

Coming up on October 8, 2011 (and on TBD dates in future years) is the International Observe the Moon Night. This special event invites the world to look up and learn about the moon. This may seem like a “Yada yada yada, whatever…” kind of event, but it’s surprising how many new discoveries about the moon don’t make it into the heads of Joe six-pack and his kids. Since the 1990s, so many spacecraft have visited the moon from so many nations that I have given up keeping track of them! Yet, despite the wealth of new info, researcher Emily CoBabe-Ammann found that no available public school book contains lunar science results that come from modern exploration – everything is based on Apollo! Well, Apollo was before I was born and it’s time to change what people know about the moon.

Lunar Phase Calendar by Dimitre Lima

I personally can’t change the US school system, but, with your help, I might be able to get some curiosity arousing materials into school teachers’ hands and onto cubical and household walls. Here is where you come in: Inspired by the amazing Lunar phase data visualization shown at right, we’ve decided at Astrosphere (parent non-profit of Astronomy Cast, 365 Days of Astronomy, and several other projects) that we are going to hold a lunar phase visualization contest. (And if Dimitri opted to enter, I’d love to see what he does with 2012!)

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to create a calendar for 2012 that communicates the phases of the moon in a way that is interesting, beautiful, and true. Our intention is that we will print the winning poster for distribution. (We are assuming we’ll get awesome submissions, but failing that, we reserve the right to only post the winning entry online.) on the back of each material will be a fact sheet on the moon that uses modern data and images.

Complete contest rules and guidelines here: Visualize-the-Moon Poster Contest

Now, we know some of you aren’t exactly artistic, but may want to help support getting awesomeness into the hands of teacher. That’s cool, there are ways for you to help to! 1. The big thing you can do today is help get the word out. Let people know via twitter, Facebook, your blog, you sig, write it on your classroom chalkboard, and, heck, write it on your forehead (ok, maybe not that). Whatever you do, anything you can do to help get the creative people in your life engaged would be awesome. 2. Donate to Astrosphere to help pay for teaching materials to get mailed to teaches. 100% of proceeds will go to printing, postage, and admittedly paying the poor person who will stuff the audience (but he works quickly and effectively). Using your funding we will send teaches requested posters and other educational materials from Astrogear.org. And finally, 3. Start thinking about planning or attend an Intenational Observe the Moon Night event on October 8.

So… Get engaged in the moon.

This donation link is specifically to donate to buy materials for teachers:

*For reasons I’ll never understand, in conference center speak, ballrooms are the large rooms that can contain the most chairs. While there may very occasionally be an actually ball in said ballrooms, their primary function is numbing butts while brains get filled.

Twitter Bird

Back in October when AAS abstracts were due, I decided to submit something that would force me to think, program, and do something just for fun and not for grants. My original idea was to (utilizing Many Eyes and Processing) do a data visualization of how all the followers of many different astronomy tweeting groups are connected.

Why? Two reasons: I wanted to know how much we are just talking to ourselves (if all of my followers follow Phil Plait, why RT?), and I wanted to know what side interests draw people together (Do people systematically follow all things Moon related?). My goal was to start with a group of selected users – NASA related folks, Zooniverse related folks, and people involved in Astrosphere’s projects (365 Days of Astronomy, Astronomy Cast, etc). I only used people active in twitter (sorry Fraser and your @fcain account, you don’t tweet), and my plan was to download all their basics (when they joined, number of updates, number of followers, etc) and then get the same for all their followers, and then get just the IDs of the followers-followers so I could build a 3d network.

For fun. ‘Cause I can. But curiosity than killed the CPU.

After I sat down, sorted out how to use the twitter API (and how to get authorized to use some of the more interesting functions), after I built in the needed ‘now pause until the beginning of the next hour because you can only make n API calls an hour, where n varies with function.’ After all of this, I set my code running.

And I waited 2 days while it ran.

Then I sat down and asked it look for how often different combinations appear – how often do people follow me and @orbitingfrog or @galaxyzoo and @chrislintott?

And I waited over night and over breakfast (sad hot little laptop) for it to run on the first level of who follows which of my initially selected hubs.

And I then I decided over lunch, for a poster this is enough. This is fun, and I’ll abuse a bigger server later.

So I started visualizing. If you are a data manipulating kind of person and you’ve never played with Many Eyes, go play. It is an awesome site with the ability to map data in lots of different ways. After uploading my data, I asked it to map my data in a way that would show all the connections and map them in a way that the more connections two people have, the closer their circles appear, and the more followers a person had, the larger their circle would be.

And it said please w…a….i….t (please). And I did. And it tried really hard, but produced something that couldn’t be explored on my sad little laptop.

So I did something a bit easier you can interact with here and see below: a map of what fraction of a users followers are shared with 1 or more other hubs. This simple (and no real wait required) visualization shows that all of us have ~20 to ~85% of our followers in common. The below tile plot visualizes the size of each Hubs following via area and relates what percentage of those followers are also connected to other Hubs via the tiles color. Lighter tiles have a higher proportion of their followers linked to non-Hubs, and are thus more often reaching non-astronomy centric audiences. Darker tiles have a higher proportion of their followers also following other astronomy hubs. While this may be seen as “speaking to the choir” it can also be seen as being more effective at pipe lining audiences to other projects (e.g. NASA_Lunar) or as having an audience that results from successful pipe lining from other projects (e.g. moonzoo). NB For this graph, @starstryder & @orbitingfrog were grouped into Astrosphere and Zooniverse respectively based on the recent focus of their online identities. I interpret the overall degree of connection observed as a sign of our RT ability through RT to send people to one another and the connectedness of our community in general. All of the hubs were connected by no more than 1 degree of separation!

Tweep Followers (Area) and Connections (Color)

While I was unable to generate the explorable 3-D mapping I desired, I did the best I could by first placing all of us on a circle (figure below) and using size, color, lines to map what I could. This diagram shows the connections between users, where the color of the connections is a blending of the colors of the Hubs (NASA: Blue, Zooniverse: Red, Astrosphere: Green. and people who are both Astrosphere and Zooniverse in Brown). (click to embiggify)

All Selected Tweeps connected

This diagram makes it hard to see exactly how each of the communities are connected to one another. I pulled our Hubs out into the same groups with the same colors, and the thickness of vertices still indicates number of connections and area of the circles indicates number of followers. It can be seen that the NASA tweeters are both very well internally connected and also share more connections in common with other Hubs than the members of the other Hubs share within their own groups’ Hubs. The degree to which programs are con-
nected to NASA is in part due to NASA Hubs simply having more followers and thus a higher opportunity to
share followers. This isn’t the entire answer however, as BadAstronomer is one of the largest Hubs and not as connected (a function of his often skeptism focused tweeting).

Networked Astronomy Tweeps

NASA Tweeps

Astrosphere Tweeps

Zooniverse Tweeps

For now, I’m going to let you explore these images on your own, checking out who is connected to whom. I’m going to do more work on this, and I’ve set as a goal (that may get destroyed by travel) to work on this a few hours each week, adding more graphs as I go. I’d hoped for today to have a form that allow you to add in your screen name and some meta data, but while traveling my server is resisting code uploads (translation, I changed my password after the last hack, and the password is on my home computer). My next post should be a “Here’s how you can be part of our map.”

Until then, my sad little CPU will be allowed to cool off.

Invited Talks are scheduled for following dates and times (pending confirmation with all speakers!). You are invited to attend all events on the Astronomy Cast Public Events UStream Channel. Please feel free to embed this channel on your own webpage!

• Mon., Jan. 4
  • 8:00 a.m. Van Biesbroeck Prize and Welcoming Address
  • 8:30 p.m. Kepler Planet Detection Mission: Introduction and First Results
  • 11:40 p.m. Russell Lectureship: RR Lyrae Atmospheres: Wrinkles Old and New
  • 3:40 p.m. Pierce Prize: Finding Utility in the Diverse Origins of Gamma-Ray Bursts
  • 4:30 p.m. LeRoy Doggett Prize: History of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate Join us in Second Life [SLURL]
  • 6:30 p.m.  Gemant Prize: Science as Performance Join us in Second Life [SLURL]

• Tues. Jan. 5
  • 12:30 p.m. Policy Talk: Charles Bolden
  • 3:40 p.m. Warner Prize: The Demographics of Exoplanets
  • 4:30 p.m. Galaxy Clusters and Black Holes: Cooling Versus Heating

• Wed. Jan. 6
  • 8:30 a.m. Invited Talk: John Grunsfeld, Shuttle Atlantis Join us in Second Life [SLURL]
  • 11:40 a.m. Heinemann Prize: The High-redshift Galaxy Jigsaw Puzzle
  • 3:40 p.m. Cannon Award: A Holistic View of Catastrophic Cosmic Explosions
  • 4:30 p.m. Rossi Prize: Strong Gravity and the Masses of Stellar Black Holes

• Thurs. Jan. 7
  • 11:40 a.m. Formation of Massive Black Hole Seeds in the First Galaxies
  • 3:40 a.m. Reionization to Near Earth Objects: Scientific Results from the Spitzer Space Telescope

Real Science by Real People all from your keyboard

Here at dotAstronomy, each day of the conference is dedicated to a different topic: Citizen Science, Web-based Research, Visualization, and Outreach. Each topic is tangled with new media and web 2.0 technologies, and by the end of the week we hope to have made the web a little bit richer to explore.

Here on day 1, we’re starting in on what is perhaps the most overarching theme: Citizen Science. At its most fundamental level, citizen science is the act of every day people making contributions to science that produce a new understanding of the topic at hand: this is real research by real people. In astronomy, variable star observations are perhaps the oldest form of citizen science. For almost 100 years the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) has worked to organize amateur astronomers to make scientifically needed measurements of everything variable, with targets varying from supernovae to eclipsing binary stars. Over the years, amateur astronomers have added to their target lists gravitational lenses, transits of exoplanets, and measurements of the flickering of active galaxies.

As amateur astronomers have taken on more and more advanced science topics, the needed equipment has grown from requiring just a pair of eyes to often (but not always!) needing a personal 16-inch telescope with a full suite of filters and digital detectors. While I am forever amazed by the personal observatories these leisure time astronomers have built (amateur is the wrong word – they have professional skills and equipment), I recognize that the digitization of astronomy data acquisition is making it harder and harder for everyday people to get involved – the cost barrier and space barrier are just too high. This is where the internet can provide solutions. For those who have an observational bent, the Global Rent-A-Scope (GRAS) provides a low cost option.

The internet also opens doors to new ways for people to contribute beyond observing. There are now a whole range of possible ways to participate, including (but not limited to) data mining and data analysis.

Here at dotastronomy, where some of us are better known by our usernames than our real-world faces, we’re focusing on these internet based ways of doing citizen science.

Our first talk of the day is by Gijs Verdoes (Kapteyn Institute), from the Astro-WISE project. This is what I would call a data mining facility, but that description is perhaps far too narrow. The Astro-WISE system provides its users ways to access both final (reduced) and raw images from a variety of sky surveys and then gives users a suite of data processing and collaboration tools. Astro-WISE also allows users to build workflows using their own or already existing algorithms that facilitates the testing of ideas that can then easily be tried and then broadly applied using recorded (and sharable!) scripts. This is a scalable system using grid computing. It is all built on python, and one of the really neat side comments coming out of this talk is that today astronomers seem to streaming away from classic data reduction languages, such as IDL, to adopt python as their data reduction language of choice. If you are interested in learning how more about Astro-WISE, I encourage you to go out and explore their guided tour.

From Astro-WISE, a project designed for professional (paid) astronomers that also facilities public astronomy, we’ve moved on to Rob Hollow and Pulse@Parkes, a project designed to get kids doing observing for/with professional scientists (@pulseatparkes on twitter). This very straightforward project that uses a few hours of telescope time on the Parkes radio telescope each month to take needed observations of pulsars where the telescope is remotely controlled by school children. Helping the kids are a variety of scientists and educators who are with them every step of the way, working both face to face with them in the remote control room and via skype from the observatory. One of the early concerns in this project was that kids would get lost in the Parkes control system, and it was suggested that perhaps a special kids control system would be needed. The thing is, kids are a lot smarter than people give them credit for. Today, the Pulse@Parkes program has the kids doing everything the pros do using the same software in the same way and this is one of the small things that make the kids most proud. While this program primarily works with Australian schools, there are American schools who have taken part. Are you a teacher? Do you want to see how to get involved? All the info you need to be a part of this can be found here.

From data mining and data acquisition (and via a coffee break), we’ve moved onto Galaxy Zoo. I know I’ve talked a lot about Galaxy Zoo here, but there are a few new things you should all go check out. Specifically, there is a new Zoo. Often referred to as “Merger Zoo” the officially named Galaxy Zoo: Understanding Cosmic Mergers project. Each day a new merger is sent out to the users and we ask everyone to try and help us model what is going on. Have you merged a galaxy today?

With the morning sessions wrapping up, we’re getting ready for an Unconference afternoon. I think I might just go learn python…

Typing. Is there any other occupation? (from Sci-fi Laura)

This year I’ve flown nearly ninety-thousand miles as I’ve chased conferences and collaboration meetings and colleagues around the globe. Today I’m a quarter turn away from yesterday, transported from Edwardsville, Illinois, USA to Leiden, Holland, the Netherlands. My passport, unused until March of 2008, now only has 2 pages left. It will be replaced in April, but it has two more trips to go: Italy for the IYA closing ceremony and than South Africa to discuss the future at the Communicating Astronomy to the Public meeting.

For now though, I am in Leiden, in my hotel room just sitting for a moment, stealing a moment to write before I’m swept away by activity.

I’m here to attend the dotAstronomy meeting. This is a conference I’ve been looking forward to for an entire year. This is someplace I know I’ll learn new things (I don’t get to always do that), and where I know I’ll hang out with people going through the same funding nightmares I’m experiencing (not good, but misery loves company?), and in general this is a place where I’m among peers who I adore and respect and with whom I expect to build great things.

That is perhaps the coolest thing of all about this little 1 week meeting: we have a goal. This week, somehow, we’re going to try and turn out a citizen science project. We’re going to combine our science know-how, our tech know-how, and our communications know-how, and together we’re going to dream and build and the hopefully invite you to be a part of it all.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be posting the UStream for the conference, and you can follow all the activity through the hashtag #dotastro on twitter.

Come, be a part of this, and help us build something new.

(If only all conferences where this cool…)

In the opening session, Craig Mundie demonstrated an office of the future that brought together a pair of digital white boards, a MS Surface (so totally want), webcams for video meetings, and more. It was a fully realized holo-office for immersive design.

Imagine if you will, a fully integrated system that combines all the best features of Adobe Connect Now (desktop sharing with WebCam), Google Docs (for collaborative document editing), Smart Boards (for putting your white board notes into your computer), and add all the gestures you use on your iPhone to the white board and your desktop screen (which is literally your desktop). Then make all the software work together fluidly.

I saw this and saw a system that would facilitate remote collaboration in a way I have dreamed of and tried to kludge together using the above software. The thing is, while video conferencing and Google Docs are things I can generally get my collaborators to adopt, they generally roll their eyes at me if I try to add any additional levels of complexity.

But what I saw this morning was a demo of a future fully integrated system and it is something I would love to work with and build for.

But I’m at a university that can’t afford this type of toy, and I wilted a bit as I saw my dream platform and realized this is not something I can without significant sponsorship replicate in my office, my lab, my cross campus collaborator’s office, and the offices of my cross country and cross ocean collaborators.

Here’s the problem: Federal grants specifically say in one way or another “Thou shalt not request office equipment.” Grants ask what are you researching? What questions that are new and exciting are you answering? They don’t ask, “what toys do you need to improve your already functional work flow?” The professors with the coolest toys either designed the toys or have non-Federal grants or funding from their university to purchase the technology. While at Harvard, several of the faculty wowed me with their digital work spaces. Same with MIT. To a lesser degree same with U-Texas.

I currently teach at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. The students I work with are the hardest working students I’ve ever encountered and I’m there for them. The best of them are as good as the students I worked with at MIT and Harvard. They are there for a variety of reasons, ranging from High Schools that didn’t prepare them for Ivy League to just not wanting to move too far from home, to just not knowing how good they are. I love my students. They are bright and shiny and the ones I work with on my research team are building great things.

That said, my university sometimes exhausts me. We just don’t have the funding to do all the cool shiny things I want to do. And this isn’t just SIUE. Talking to colleagues, the problems we’re facing are common across state universities everywhere. As tax revenue falls, education funding falls with it. We reached a point last semester when there was no longer funding for office supplies. When there isn’t money for white board markers and the secretaries start keeping hidden caches of chalk, it is hard to say “Hey – can I have a few ‘K’ to better facilitate communications with my collaborators in the UK?”

One of the benefits that students at places like Harvard and MIT enjoy is the ability to immerse themselves in the latest technologies in the labs they work in and in the teaching labs they learn in. Their high tuition pays (in part) for these facilities, and endowments, corporate sponsorships, and donations pay the rest. The students who get into these schools aren’t all rich, but they all benefited from a high quality back ground (whether it be a private school or an inner city school) opened the door for a high quality higher education.

There is a digital divide in America. Looking through studies at the Pew Internet and American Life website, you can see that the poor, the rural, the minorities, the immigrants and the elderly aren’t online. They aren’t getting prepared in ways that require online and digital content consumption.

There is a digital divide between universities. My upper division students don’t all know how to use Excel. They don’t all know how to use a word processor. They don’t even all know how to use a mouse in a coherent manner. And I don’t have a way to wow them into being inspired that a George Jetson Holo-Office future is coming and they need to get with the digital now. The best I can do is invite them to wave at a colleague in Skype now and then. I, who live a virtual life, have a normal office with a normal laptop and a normal sized monitor living a normal, not particularly wow-ing life.

I want to take the next steps. I want to improve my work flow, to improve my communications with collaborators, to improve my way of interacting with data, and to improve how I distribute my results to the public. I want to adopt the technologies I’m seeing here.

And I will ask MS for help.

But looking around at the Ivy League, the Big State, the top school, the private school, and the generally prestigious school name tags, I wonder how many others from underserved universities are here to ask, “MS, will you collaborate with me and help me learn how to work better?”

I’m going to go for lunch, fund my students, and see what I can find.

My original switch was the result of my laptop, then a VIAO, getting sick one too many times. My beloved VIAO with its x-windows emulator allowed me to login to a Solaris server somewhere else and do my astronomy work. I had virus protection and always surfed safe. Then I discovered there are viruses that will swim up closed ports. I got series of viruses that wiped my hard drive while at work at Harvard, and was twice one of the first 100 sufferers. It sucked. I live by software. I am more of a digital person than a real person in a lot of ways – taking all notes on computer/phone and talking more through IM and email than in person. I also have dyslexia, and computers allow me to mostly hide my problems behind spell checks and auto correcting tools. I love my laptops – they are a third arm and a second brain. And after two cases of digital amputation in short order, I switched to Mac. Back in 2004 I bought my first MacBook and I haven’t looked back.

But now I’m working with my students to develop software that integrate with Microsoft Research software. I’m typing this message on my ASUS EeePC 1000HE in Windows XP. In this tiny environment, I can hold the universe in my hands using MS World Wide Telescope. This many layered software package is being designed to facilitate not just looking at the sky, but for searching databases of images and information, allowing users to side by side explore the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Hubble image archive.

While I will leap frog Vista, staring suspiciously at it while I pass to Windows 7 someday in the future, XP is an old friend, and I feel like I’m falling back into the multi-platform days of graduate school. I have found a cool toy that I can only code if I’m using Windows, so I’m going to use Windows to play along with my software developing students.

MS Research has a bunch of cool toys. They are building George Jetson‘s tomorrow with a Star Trek aesthetic. From Surface, to the virtual receptionist, to, well, World Wide Telescope, they have my attention again.

Now, if only Apple and Mac would just use the same keyboard layout…

As some of you may know, Nick Rattenbury is leaving the Jodcast and the rest of the team (including the original Astronomy Blog author Stuart Lowe) are stupidly busy, soooooo Fraser Cain and I decided to help them out and adopt their show to make sure it keeps going.

The first episode of the new Jodcast, under the new branding of Astronomy Cast, is now available. Check it out on the Jodcast Website.

One of the great things about being part of the dynamic team that is building IYA is getting to see this project grow and evolve. Today IYA announced the hiring of their  core staff, and guess what: I’m part of it. In a press release issued by the IYA co-chairs, Doug Isbell and Susana Deustua, the United States IYA program announced the hiring of Steve Pompae as the US Program Director and the Andrea Schweitzer and Kristina Harding as the Project Manager and her assistant (think super hero side kick). I’ll be the IYA Web Developer (like you couldn’t have guessed that).

In addition to these staff hirers (which don’t really effect your day to day lives), people are gearing up their activities in preparation for the big kick off. In some cases, this includes lots of paperwork flying around as projects are defined. In other cases, this  includes tools getting upgraded and updated.

One such tool is FITsLiberator.  Back in the old days, I used to go to terrible pains to try and take my nice science images and turn them into pretty pictures (I’m on the wrong computer to share). It required getting everything just so in IRAF and then printing to file, and then layering in Photoshop, and much ftping between my Sun SparcStation and my Windows PC (these were the press OS X days). Then NRAO came out with FITSview, and I could at least get things from FITS to photoshop all using 1 computer. (WOOT!) But… But it was still a serious pain. Until one magical day when the ESO announced the creation of FITS Liberator, a plug-in for Photoshop that allows images to be directly imported into Photoshop. That’s right – process your images on the system of your choice, and you can go from FITS to pretty image in one software package.

The problem is, if you are like me and use an Intel Mac, FITS Liberator didn’t quite work unless you use Rosetta mode. I have to admit that rather then figure out what that is or how to access whatever it is, I’ve been pulling out my old PowerBook G4 laptop (the one I own, versus the ones my grants provide) whenever I need to make pretty images. This week, however, my need to pull out my old CPU has been shelved.  The wonderful team from NASA/ESA/ESO have released version 2.2 with a universal binary!

In addition to happily running on my MacBookPro (and Vista), this software also includes support for the new VAMP metadata. This new, but very little known, fledgling metadata for images is something that will hopefully make it possible to quickly and easily find images of specific wavelengths, sizes, and qualities. The IYA Cornerstone Project, “The Portal to the Universe,” will even let you index your images using their website and this metadata. Getting VAMP metadata into FITSliberator is a first step. It is an important step. And it is a step that makes my MacBookPro feel a bit more complete.

One tool at a time, IYA is becoming real.

In organizing Astronomy Cast, we started off looking at Basecamphq September ’06. That lasted about a month. The free version just didn’t do what we wanted and going to a separate website was something I wasn’t very good at doing on a regular basis. Then we (translation: Fraser) discovered Google Notebooks, and organization was inflicted on our podcast. Today we keep notes, to-do lists, listener questions, and much much more in a Google Notebook, and when we need something a bit more complicated, we bump up to a Google Spreadsheet or Doc.

While these tools aren’t designed for Project Management, they have the advantage of being part of my standard workflow – I can put widgets for all the Google tools in my iGoogle homepage and whenever I pop open a new browser window I see what new things have been edited, added to, or arrived in my inbox. I also keep my calendar in Google (one flaw – I can’t get alarms to go off on my iPhone when I import calendars to iCal from Google).

Google Notes has served us well, but it’s time to move on. Today, faced with a glorious snow day and 8 hours I normally don’t have, I decided to evaluate online project management software. Here are the specific needs I identified:

• Project Calendar must be sharable via iCalendar protocol
• Must allow me to easily add other people
• Task List / To Do list should allow me to create Gantt diagrams or similar project timelines
• File Sharing that doesn’t care about file format
• Ability to comment on tasks, projects, etc…
• I need to be able to email collaborators in a straightforward way

Not knowing what all was out there, I did some Googling. I learned that if you want to view a demo of @Task you have to give them a phone number, which triggers one of their sales reps calling you before you have time to launch the demo. I also learned @Task is designed for managing Fortune 100 companies, not podcasts, so I moved on. I also looked at Intuit’s Quickbase and determined it will take more than 10 minutes to figure out, but will do anything. At $249/month, it is a graphically ugly, very powerful, out of my price range, but an option for someday when I have money and need power. (I definitely want to learn more.)

Those two set aside, I had two practical contenders left: Basecamphq (software that had already given me a poor user experience a long time ago), and a new (and poorly rated awhile back on LifeHacker) program from Etelos that integrates with google aps. Without a lot of optimism, I set out to compare these two packages and hopefully improve my workflow. All I could do was hope both had experienced extensive updates that made them useful. One of them came through for me.

Side-by-Side breakdown of selected features

* Basecamp offers both a messaging area for discussions and a “whiteboard”
** Basecamp has both milestones and to-dos. To-do items do not allow deadlines.

How I compared them:
I have several website design projects in my head that needed written down somewhere. I went into both programs and assigned myself at my star stryder address several tasks, and assigned myself at my siue address several tasks. I then attempted to collaborate with myself, leaving my alter egos comments and such.

What I discovered is that for projects with true teamwork going on – the type I prefer to participate in – Basecamp just doesn’t cut it. It also doesn’t deal with due dates or priorities. (see features list above)

Here’s an example scenario that sold me on the Etelos software: Over the last couple weeks I’ve been working on drafting an internal IYA vision statement for the New Media working group. I was the person in charge of this, but I wanted input from several of my colleagues. To do this in the Etelos software I could create a task, give it a due date and priority, attach a file to the task, and then invite my team members as collaborators. They could then attach new versions of the file and leave comments as needed. I could also email all of the collaborators from the Task View easily. If I was getting paid to do this (I wasn’t), I could even track the time I spent writing, commenting, etc using task associated time logging. (hmmm, this has so many applications for Astronomy Cast…)

In Basecamp (where I’d need to get a paid account to share files), I wouldn’t have the ability to associate a bunch of other people with a To-Do item or a Milestone. (The to-do versus milestone thing is also problematic. Since To-Do items don’t have deadlines, you have to either name them with a deadline in the title, or use a Milestone, which gives you very limited writing space. – Neither To-Do items or Milestones have priorities either.) I’d also have to put the comments (they call them messages) associated with the task in the main project area and share them with everyone. This isn’t optimal, and it could lead to issues with too many cooks (really – sub-committees need to be able to hold their meetings without the whole committee leaning over their shoulders).

The collaboration tools I want just weren’t in Basecamp.

And then there is the whole integration with Google Aps thing that Etelos has going that just makes me happy. I put their gadgets on my iGoogle page, and I’m now one click away from project management. To login, I can also go to any page on the Etelos site and just click on “installations.” If you just go to the Basecamphq homepage there is a link that says, “login”, but when you click on it you are taken to a screen telling you to go to your projects specific URL and telling you to email someone if you don’t remember what that URL is. This is highly highly annoying.

Now, just incase you think I’m so totally in love with the Etelos software that I found no flaws, let me assure you that their software isn’t perfect. Its number one problem is a nasty habit of giving me a new tab every few minutes as I switch between projects, tasks and settings. It is stupidly easy to end up with 10 tabs open. Eek! Their interface is also uglier then Basecamphq and it can be slow to update. This was only really annoying when interacting with the project timeline. I’d reorder tasks and it would think for a few minutes and then adjust the timeline.

The Etelos software also didn’t have a native calendar. Instead, it linked directly to a Google calendar. Now here is where things get weird. I keep myself logged into google via a gmail account all the time. I logged into Etelos using a different email address, however, and embedded the Etelos into my iGoogle page. Somehow (cookies?) Etelos was able to know to go to the calendar associated with my iGoogle rather then trying to associate one with my other account. When I signed out of Google, Etelos no longer could get to my calendar and asked me to please log into Google, so I don’t feel totally invaded, just a little unsure about my cookie settings. Now, to be completely honest, I like that it uses Google Calendar directly. Google calendars are iCalendar compliant and can be subscribed to with pretty much any calendar program (although, as previously noted, alarms may go away). I’m also a Google Calendar addict and see that this would allow me to associate a bunch of calendars with Etelos Projects seamlessly.

Basecamp’s internal calendar is iCalendar compliant as well, but it is limited to milestones and 1 calendar per project. With Etelos, you can add anything you want at anytime to multiple Google calendars.

Etelos is a new kid on the block, and its forums are pretty empty compared to places like WordPress. I suspect they don’t have a ton of users. That said, I was impressed to get a personal email from them within a couple hours of setting up my trial account. It was just a friendly little, “We’re here to help,” message that let me feel wanted. I know that is purely emotional, but it still gave me a bit of confidence that their support folks wanted my business.

So, I think my free Etelos account and I are going to see what we can plot. I’m going to continue to adore my OmniPlan and use it for writing grants (Mmmm, Gantt diagrams…). For day to day activities, I think I’m going to consider setting aside my hacking habits and stop using Google Notebook in misbegotten ways.

Footnote:
I know I’m not the only one abusing software for project planning. In addition to Google Aps, two common software abuses are the use of Wikis/Twikis and of Blackboard/Moodle.

Wikis/Twikis are tools for documenting things for replication later. Think of them as knowledge bases. If you are going to be running a yearly conference or reducing data the same way every 6 months, then set up a Wiki or Twiki and document document document. What Wikis/Twikis lack are calendars, to do lists, and management tools. They also don’t generally allow controlled emailing of collaborators. I think that all projects that include lots of repetitive things that will get perfected over time need Wikis/Twikis as the living memory of the projects and organization. I do not think they are needed for folks constantly doing new things that are all one-off activities. Not everything needs a dedicated, editable, collaborative webpage

Blackboard/Moodle are academic programs designed to run universities. You can assign tasks (and grade them ), discuss things in forums, and share files. Different sub-committees can be created as separate classes. It’s a giant hack, and requires you to have your own server. That said, it can work. It just doesn’t work perfectly and everything is named wrong. Still, in a university setting, it can be a good way to get the entire university discussing a project and collaborating.

In late October or early November of last year, eons in academic life, one of our graduate students introduced me to something that I think is going to have a dramatic impact on teaching physics and on how we interact with computers, especially in the classroom. Why do I think this is going to be so important? It’s cool, it’s powerful and flexible, it’s cheap, and a fair number of our students already have or want one. The gadget I’m referring to is the remote for the Wii gaming platform, sometimes called the Wiimote. The Wiimote measures acceleration and position in three dimensions. Better still, it communicates with the world using the Bluetooth protocol which most recent computers also use. What this means is that the Wiimote can be used for a lot more than playing video games. To get an idea of what kinds of things, take a look at Johnny Chung Lee’s videos: tablet computer / smart board, virtual reality, finger tracking. As far as classrooms are concerned, I think the smart board application is going to have the most impact: it’s easy to use and, to be terribly mundane, the price is definitely right.

Wiimote tracking acceleration (green spikes) of a cart on an air-track as the cart rebounds off a stretched rubber band.

If you have a Wiimote handy, or can extract one briefly from a nearby teenager’s hands, take a look at DarwiinRemote (on Macs) or WiinRemote (on PCs) to get an idea of how the Wiimote might be useful for teaching physics. Being a Mac user, DarwiinRemote is the only software I have any first-hand experience with for the Wiimote. In fact, I spent most of fall break in the middle of my parents’ living room floor with family and in-laws carefully avoiding me while I muttered imprecations and obscure incantations as I tried to learn Xcode and Eclipse (free software to make programming easier), Objective C and OpenGL (programming languages), and Subversion (a way of letting a bunch of people work on the same program without driving all and sundry completely crazy) just so I could make DarwiinRemote a better platform for teaching physics. I haven’t finished yet, but will get back to it eventually – maybe spring break. The Wiimote tracks position by tracking the locations of up to four infrared light sources with a camera in one end of the Wiimote. (The camera is reported (see Sensing) to be made by PixArt and works by triangulation.) I haven’t set up my light sources yet, so I’ll have to write about that some other time. The Wiimote tracks acceleration through a tiny mass suspended on even tinier springs in three directions. What the Wiimote reads is how much the springs are stretched. Since the mass is suspended within the body of the Wiimote, dropping the Wiimote reproduces the condition of astronauts in orbit – free-fall. (The so called “vomit comet” also reproduces free-fall and some roller coasters at least come close by having parabolic arcs in their tracks.) This means that if you drop the Wiimote, all three axes will report no acceleration while if you set the Wiimote on a flat surface, at least one axis, depending on orientation, will report an acceleration of magnitude g. So what can you do with this? Swing it in a circle around your head and see how high the acceleration will go (the Wiimote can’t measure more than 5g unfortunately). Attach the Wiimote to a long string. Why do two or three of the traces show periodic accelerations and not just one? Strap the Wiimote to the catcher in a ballistic pendulum experiment and see how long it takes the collision to occur. Walk around and see how you accelerate and decelerate with each step. Try to match a particular pattern of acceleration and deceleration. Imagine athletes strapping a Wiimote to an arm or leg or head to monitor how they move – the next step from video analysis. (The catch here is staying within Bluetooth range, roughly 10m, of your laptop.)

There are a few things I’d like to develop that don’t exist yet. One, which has some implementation but, as far as I’m aware, for Macs, is tracking two Wiimotes with the same computer. Then students could see, in real time, the accelerations of two carts as they collided with each other. For ergonomics, particularly in sports, it would be nice to have a small data recorder light enough and rugged enough to be carried with the athlete so that the Bluetooth range wouldn’t be an issue. There is software using the Wiimote to teach drumming technique (p20).

Motion sensors aren’t really new in teaching labs, so why did this one get me so wound up I’d spend a whole vacation teaching myself new stuff just so I could play with it? One thing is that it’s three axes and not just one. Another is that it’s relatively small and light – designed to be held and swung instead of rigidly mounted. A third is that it’s cheap enough to buy as a toy and the software is open source so I can fix it if it doesn’t do what I want – which I’ve already done some of. Lastly is the fact that the Wiimote wasn’t designed for a specific experiment, it was designed to do more or less everything and it’s up to us to find cool things to do with it.

Finally, I’m very excited that I have four of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville computer science students whose senior assignment to write a cross-platform piece of software specifically focussed on using Wiimotes to teach physics.

For more on open source software for the Wiimote on all operating systems, go to the Wiili site.

It is all just a three dimensional mental mess.

But there is software to help. Keith Ebbeke send me a link to some neat software called “Where is M13?”

This straightforward software allows you to see side-by-side views of the galaxy from the top down and edge on and see where things are located from both perspectives at the same time. You can also switch to a sky view, and see where things are if you happen to opt to go outside and look up.

“Where is M13?” is free and available for both Mac, Linux and Windows. It contains several prominent catalogues of objects, including the Messier, NGC, and Caldwell catalogues. Next time you go to a star party, consider taking this with you on your laptop. It is just cool to be able to get a scale for the cosmos while also looking out through your laptop.

This is an OM#G bright laser. This is a laser that the laser safety officer on my campus (a good friend in the office across the hall from me), made me register and agree not to ever use as a laser pointer indoors infront of students ever ever ever. (Really. Do not use this thing on a movie/overhead screen.) This is a laser I want to use to build neat optical demos, and to point out constellations when I know I’m in an FAA no fly zone or when I have 4 spotters watching for air planes. This is a goober powerful laser that is the size of a sharpie. (see my image above left)

So here are some stats:

• In the battle of laser versus photosensor (many thanks to Jack Glassman for making this measurement!), the laser weighs in with a bolometric power (power across all wavelengths) of 160 +/- 5 mW. This is significantly more than the “Max Power Output < 125mW” listed on the laser. That said, these extra milli-Watts may be in some color other than green, so that “125mW” number may only apply to the 532nm light (green comes from doubling the energy in red photons). Jack didn’t have a spectrograph, and nor do I
• The laser beam is ~0.5cm in diameter at a distance of 2.4m. This corresponds to a spread of 0.12 degrees. This means that the beam will be ~2m in diameter at a distance of 1km, and ~845km in diameter on the surface of the moon.

Here is what this means. Let’s assume the laser gives off photons only in 532nm light (energy per photon = hc/532nm = 3.7×10^-19 J). This means the laser gives of 4.3×10^17 photons per second (# photons/sec = 160mW/(energy per photon)/sec). If you stood in front of the laser, 1 km away from the laser, ~1/1,000,000 of the laser’s light would enter the 7mm diameter opening in your eye, nailing your retina with ~0.0001mW of energy.

On the moon (ignoring atmospheric scattering, which is a HUGE thing to ignore), an astronaut’s eye would still intercept ~30 photons each second (area of beam at Moon/Area of Eye*#of photons)! For comparison, your eye only intercepts 300-400 photons from a 6th magnitude star each second! Kind of cool?

Now, you may be asking yourself how it is that this little laser, at just 160mW, can have such a large effect on the moon when a 100 W lightbulb won’t. The difference comes in how the light spreads out. The 100W from that bulb spreads in all directions. This means its photons, at the distance of the moon, are spread over 5×10^17m^2 instead of the 6×10^11m^2 area the laser spreads over. There is a difference of about 625 in power between the 2 sources, and a difference of 900,000 in the area the light is spread over. This means the lightbulb is 1500 times fainter at the moon than the laser!

Okay – so I’m having way to much fun with math, and really wish I was teaching physics for engineers this semester because these calculations would make a great test question

Needless to say, when using this in a star party, you can see the beam easily in the sky (USE SPOTTERS TO WATCH FOR PLANES – do not point anywhere near a plane! I can’t find any laws saying it’s illegal to use one, but – really, do you want to blind a pilot?) During a star party, you can actually say the beam is hitting the moon!

Anyway – the laser is way cool.

There are a few things I’d change though (all safety):

• It is possible (according to the insert, but I couldn’t find the option on the website quickly) to get the Infinite laser with an optional safety key that would allow you to make it so that silly little children and absent minded professors can’t turn it on and stare into the beam and blind themselves. The key probably shouldn’t be optional.
• The box should say in big letters “Use of goggles when using this laser indoors is highly recommended to prevent eye damage from reflected light.” Really, the back scatter off of just a white wall is amazing! In the picture above right (mine) the laser beam is hitting the cloth on a speaker cover because that was the least reflective thing I could find!

So, what can you do with one? Well, pointing out constellations, stars, planets, galaxies, satellites (NOT airplanes) are all good things. You can make every other astronomer on the star party field jealous. You, science teachers out there, can also build optical tweezers (which I plan to do when I get some spare time), measure the size of pits on a CD using diffraction, and make spectacular diffraction patterns for classroom demos (done at an angle that doesn’t allow scattered light to back scatter to the students in huge amounts).

I’m g0ing to have fun this semester.

Meanwhile, we live in Illinois.

This wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for this fabulous thing called the Internet. Across its high-wires and by-wires we shoot our lives across the world, meeting for lunch across the desk from one another, with a video camera bringing our friends’ multi-continental faces face-to-face.

This is an alternate reality that doesn’t belong to all of us. As I find myself symbiotically connected to the Matrix via a cellular broadband card from random corners of this country, I know there are others who still linger in the land of landlines and dialup.

And there are those without computers.

This is hard for me to grok. I’ve had a computer of my own since 4th grade and a computer in my home as long as I can remember. I learned to count so I could find Pong on the cassette player that served up data to our now ancient Apple computer.

Our computer literacy opens up a world to my household that will make us part of a separate society. We will be part of a New Media tomorrow, where our video content comes from YouTube, Google Video, and other streaming content. We will interact with others via Skype, and forego the telephone as a thing only called by telemarketers. We will setup iGoogle pages, write blogs, share our drives across our house, and answer every “I wonder.. who/where/how/when” with an instantaneous IMDB / wikipedia / Google search. Our news will come from Fark and SlashDot as we read Digg and our collected RSS feeds more than we read the Times or Post.

We will? No, actually, we have. We live in that tomorrow.

These amazing resources allow me to walk into work and talk to my colleagues about the latest outrage with world-weary knowledge gleaned from too much outraged Googling. These amazing resources allow me to learn at home every day, constantly experiencing life-long learning as I freely explore tutorials, learning videos, and even online classrooms in Second Life as I work to understand things beyond my astronomy degree (plumbing anyone? No, how about German?).

But I am a freak of a high-speed, 10mbps down / 1mbps up, world.

“Did you see on Stumble Upon…?” I asked a colleague of a different generation. Blank stare.

“Did you see on Google Earth…?” I asked a student. Blank Stare.

“I’ll show you how to use that software later. Let’s screen share in BRIO,” I said to a real-world friend. Blank Stare.

Just as there is a small segment of the society that falls in the “richer than God” category, there is a small segment of society that falls in the “more wired than Bill Gates” category (I don’t think anyone is more wired than Steve Jobs ). I’m not in either of these categories, but our household is definitely closing in on one of these boundaries faster than we’re closing in on the other.

There is irony embedded in the mark-up language of the digital divide. Online content is largely free and ranges across almost all topics. Because I can afford broadband, I can access the world’s libraries, avoid international telephone charges, pay bills without buying stamps, and generally self-select to be a shut-in if I decide the real world is just way too scary. I can even order groceries, pizza, a freshwater fish freighted to my front step.

I suspect I save more money using the Internet than I spend on our cable bill.

Let me state this again for emphasis more clearly: Because I can afford the up front expenditure – installation, hookup, routers, computers, deposit (because my husband is Canadian and the cable company hates Canadians) – we can save money on life, learn effectively, live virtually, and collaborate LAN to LAN as all boundaries are erased between my computer and yours.

As a Web 2.0 content provider, I have to wonder if podcasting is the digital generations form of polo. We often gather around and root for our favorite player blogger, and occasionally try our hand riding the ponies RSS. When we talk about our popularity (Hey, Phil and I are both in the “Open Labs: Best Science Blogs of 2007”), do the mainstream masses know what this means? Are we leading a tsunami of content over the LAN, or are we just a small crest created by a 2 horsepower engine MHz processor on a really small pond.

I understand why people still do TV. Do you know anyone who wants a TV and doesn’t have one?

I understand why people still do radio. Do you know anyone without a radio?

Just as there are gestures designed at redistributing wealth in the US, there are also gestures designed at redistributing Internet. Libraries give free access. Schools give free access. There are free hotspots for the laptop lugging among us. Even McDonald’s is in on the digital distribution of content.

But are there gestures in other countries? Can a kid is Katmandu kill time in an Internet Café for free, for fun, for more than a few minutes at a time?

One of the corner stone projects of the International Year of Astronomy is the creation of a Media Portal that will allow the astronomy aficionados of the world to log in and lounge around in the stars. There will be links to live satellite feeds, twitter feeds, press feeds, pictures a plenty, and widgets to wend around the sky within. I am part of the team that will be creating this portal, and as I sit here, working to learn how to program my first desktop widget (woot!), I wonder what segment of the world our worldwide portal will reach? Do I need to have different interfaces for high speed, and low speed surfers. Is Flash fair on an international playing field?

Are there things I haven’t anticipated – invisible digital walls that keep the surfers from breeching the content castle?

Yes. Yes there are.

I know there are many of you out there reading this who are in other nations. Where are you reading? Can you reach all online content? What are your limitations? What do we, the content providers need to provide you with to make our world part of your world.

I want to know. What digital walls need shattered?

The telescope was parked in its dome with great care,
In hopes of spying a star on which it could stare;

My students were nested all snug in their beds
While visions of data danced in their heads

And I in my office, my Mac at my side,
Was Googling for gifts – no bargain could hide.

When on the network, there arose a great clatter,
I popped up an xterm to ping what’s the matter

Ping 74.208.25.93
“CONNECTION FAILED” was all it said back to me.

The lamp on the screen of the Mac Book Pro
Illuminated too many processes refusing to go.

When, on what should my wandering eyes obsess,
But a remote client, and eight shared processes!

With a little old driver, and each program taking its time,
I knew in a moment it again must be Dr. Belstein.

More rapid than Windows, his executions they came,
As he typed, and compiled, and called languages by name;

“Now, Java! Now, Python! Now, GNU C++!
On, Cobalt! On Pascal! On, Visual C++!”

Make software to formulate where Santa shall go!
Now make away! make away! make away -o!”

As old ‘puters not updated cease to fly,
My processor whirred and proceeded to die,

Up to the network panel, my fingers they flew,
As I typed IPCONFIG /Release and /Renew

And then, in a second, I heard from the hall
Some cursing and a keyboard tossed like a ball.

As I leaned my head out, and looked all around,
I heard from his office the most amazing of sounds.

He was dressed all in tweed, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were chalky and somehow dusted in soot!

A bundle of disks he had clutched in his teeth,
And he was a bit manic, as the sys admin he beseeched.

His eyes — how they twinkled! The promises he made!
For Beowulf access, bonuses would be paid!

His droll little mouth was drawn down like a bow,
And his chin quivered as if he stood in the snow;

The loop of a flash drive he held tight in his hand,
While his desktop sent death encircling the LAN;

He had a broad face and a little pot belly,
That shook, as he begged (like a bowlful of jelly).

He was tenured and sage, a right powerful prof,
No non-tenured faculty dared tick him off;

In the sys-admin, however, there was no dread,
The passwords were contained just one place: His Head!;

He spoke not a word, ignoring the old bloak,
To the Beowulf he gave not even a poke

He just proceeded to open the main system node,
And with a click, updates he began to upload

Belstein stomped to his desk, letting out a great sigh,
Another year lost, (I thought he might cry).

But I heard him state, as if he couldn’t care less,
“Next Christmas I’ll find Santa using GPS.”

Merry Christmas!

There are good times. For instance, in about three months this summer and fall Fraser Cain and I, with the help of undergraduate Rebecca Bemrose-Fetter and graduate student Georgia Bracey, managed to do a quick a solid study on who listens to Astronomy Cast and responds to surveys. The paper is already published and you can find it here. That was fun, challenging to analyze in a “I need a brain but not a Nobel prize” kind of way. That’s the type of low-hanging-fruit every researcher likes to pick and munch every now and again.

The research I worked on today, however, led me to question the logical nature of my field. Along with another student (whose name I’m not publishing without permission), I’m currently working on a follow-up project to my dissertation. Back in 2002, I noticed (and I’m not the only one to notice this) that there is a trend as a function of density in how galaxy clusters evolve. Basically, small groups of galaxies, like the one we live in, don’t really evolve that much over the course of the universe. Spiral galaxies stay spiral and violence like collisions and gravitational harassment just don’t happen that often. At the same time, really rich large clusters form first and very quickly and they whip their member galaxies into a frenzy of mutual destruction. Galaxies are quickly beaten into elliptical forms, star formation is cut off, and anything new that falls in is quickly destroyed.  It is the mid-sized systems that are most interesting. They start out filled with spirals, but as the millenniums tick by the spirals collide into one another, one by one, until today these systems are devoid of star formation and rich boring elliptical galaxies.

Observationally, we have specific ways to describe cluster density and the fraction of spiral to elliptical galaxies. Unfortunately, we have more than one way to do each of these things. This is where my personal frustration comes in. My student and I wanted to cull for the astronomy literature a large collection of published values and than look for a general trend. We were even prepared to solve for ways to convert from one way of determining galaxy density to another way. What we hadn’t expected is the utter lack of relationship we are finding in some cases. Let me see if I can explain at least one aspect of this problem.

Let’s take galaxy size and density. The most well known catalogue of galaxy clusters is probably the Abell Catalogue.  In his original 1958 paper, Abell described cluster richness using the number of galaxies “counted in a cluster that are not more than 2 mag. fainter than the third brightest member.” This method requires the counter to know where the edge of the galaxy is, and doesn’t work very well for large, diffuse systems that are difficult to sort out from background and foreground systems (think, Zwicky clusters). It also doesn’t work well for systems that are rich, but only have a few extraordinarily bright galaxies and scores of fainter systems.

Since that catalogue, people have been trying over and over to find a better way. For instance, Butcher and Oemler count galaxies “with projected distances from the cluster center less than R30, and with absolute visual magnitudes Mv <= -20″ where R30 “is the radius of the circle containing [30]% of the cluster’s projected galaxy distribution.” This system consistently counts the same type of galaxies, and while R30 isn’t perfect, it is better than trying to define the whole galaxy cluster.

Other methods also measure the number of galaxies brighter than certain cutoff magnitudes within a specific number of megaparsecs, or the number of galaxies within a specific number of megaparsecs of the cluster’s brightest galaxy or radio galaxy.

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are as many ways of measuring cluster size as there are groups measuring cluster parameters. The radical differences in the systems means there isn’t even a direct way to convert from one system to another. This means that it just isn’t possible to look for detailed relationships using all the data that is out there without doing some serious reanalysis. What had looked like a nice easy literature review project to work on with a student grew into something that is requiring a lot of head scratching, and I’m afraid that to do the project right, we’ll need to use SDSS data, which makes this very much not a 1 semester project for an undergrad. So… we’re going to do what we can with all the published data that we can get on a mostly standard system (and it looks like we’ll be using Abell counts, as flawed as they are).

At least it’s not quite apples and oranges. I think I can safely call all our data citrus. Unfortunately, I think the clemintines got mixed in with the tangerines.

Image Credit: That ones all mine It’s a galaxy cluster I discovered as part of my dissertation research.

These random student questions can lead the class on wild rides (and I love rollercoasters). They give me a chance to answer a lot of questions involving space, astronomy, and spacecraft in my physics classes as we stray off topic into the realm of “what if?” There are also days when we get into discussions on all the ways you can destroy things, accelerate things, or (one of my favorite topics) design more frightening rollercoasters. This isn’t to say there aren’t also days when I say with a sigh, “I’m really sorry, but I need to at least get through some of [insert less interesting topic here] so you’ll get what you need out of the class.” Those days happen. There are also days when my students ask me questions I just can’t answer on topics like chemistry, particle physics, electronics (it’s all magic – when you see smoke, that’s the magic escaping), or even sometimes astronomy. I’ve learned that it’s okay to say, “Let me look it up,” or “email me so I can find someone who knows.” Students understand that we can’t know everything, and as long as I try and I’m honest, a good classroom dynamic seems to follow.

And I’m guessing I’m not the only teacher who has these days, and enjoys their students’ questions (even when they can’t answer them all). With Astronomy Cast, we’ve decided that we want to be a part of helping high school teachers  get their students questioning by putting ourselves out there as folks willing to answer questions.

And if you’re a school teacher, I’d love it if you’d email us so we can get you involved.

Here’s what’s going on: Inspired by the success of our “Questions Shows,” Astronomy Cast is creating a “Student Questions” series. These shows will answer a selection of student questions, emphasizing questions related to high-energy astrophysics, in 30-minute podcasts. High-energy astrophysics studies some of the most energetic and exotic objects in the Universe, including: supermassive black holes and their jets of charged particles, exploding stars, and city-sized neutron stars spinning thousands of times per second. Each show will eventually have an illustrated transcript, and questions will also be indexed online by topic. Submitted questions not used in shows will still be answered, but will only appear in the online index. To facilitate educators submitting audio questions, Astronomy Cast can provide recording devices that can be shipped on loan to schools at no cost to them (return postage provided). Teachers are also free to use any existing equipment their school has to send us audio. This program is sponsored by NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope Education and Public Outreach program.

Interested? To find out how to apply, download the front and back of this flier. If you’re a teacher, drop Astronomy Cast an email at info at astronomycast dot com, or email me at pamela at starstryder dot com. Also, feel free to give a copy of the front and back of that flier to your favorite teen’s high school teacher.

The more the merrier (and the more fun this podcast series will be). Get your kid(s) asking questions, and I’ll be here with Fraser, doing my best to get them answers.

(And tomorrow, I’ll talk about something more astronomical)

Jordan Raddick is currently talking about using the internet to advance science. He is addressing how we are moving into a new paradigm for doing science as our data is reaching the point of petabyte data sets. The old paradigm has an observer downloading their data, analyzing it, and doing a discrete publication with the data in a table in the back. Today, it simply takes too long to download, requires too many disks, and it isn’t feasible to publish when the researchers dataset is 20,000,000 points!

He points out the following -

Old Model: Feudalism
“Today’s model: The peasants (grad students) bring the harvest (data) to their lords (professors). The harvest is tightly controlled by the availability of tools (telescope time). Lords are responsible to higher authorities (funding agencies).”

New Model: Democracy
“Resources (data) are available to anyone willing to work for them Representatives (professors) collaborate with voters (grad students) to accomplish goals of mutual interest (research).”

This is actually proving true. There was the public chess game. There is wikipedia. The hive mind, splitting up and distributing the task, comes up with better answers than the average genius.

“With Astrodemocracy, all you need is a computer and a high speed internet connection.”

And SDSS is the perfect target dataset for the hive analysis to shred into understanding. The entire 4 TB dataset is free to everyone, online, anytime. The SkyServer tool works like Google maps to let people explore the sky. It can be used for whimsical exploration or detailed creation of finding charts, comp star sequences. The data can also be queried directly through an SQL database.

Here’s an idea: Create citizen science projects (like Galaxy zoo) to facilitate large dataset exploration. Computers just can’t easily determine the shape of galaxies, but humans do it without much thought. One grad school, who had the misfortune of classifying 50,000 galaxies from SDSS by hand (yikes!), wrote Galaxy Zoo to get help. (The data shall be assimilated?)

Released in July 2007, Galaxy Zoo has lead to 100,000 members analyzing galaxies, and even searching for galaxies shaped like letters cause, well, it’s fun! Science results are starting to come out, and the first papers will emerge in December(-ish). One neat preview fact: They are finding a remarkable population of red spirals that would have otherwise been missed (computers assume all red objects are elliptical galaxies).

Another major internet project is the Virtual Observatory: “A way of bringing data into a common framework that allows a common framework.” Virtual observatories are being created to allow users around the world to access data in all wavelengths all over over the world just as Google allows content to be found anywhere anytime. The virtual observatory looks into existing data allowing new combinations and new results to be observed online.

Google Sky is one way of interfacing some of the piles of data on the Internet, and the World Wide Telescope also may allow guided tours with hyperlinking.

This online content in the astronomy democracy, however, doesn’t replace your telescope that let’s you explore with your eyes, your camera, what’s above your head. Go out, look up, enjoy!

(and invite Jordan to give a talk if you ever need a speaker. He is very very dynamic and I was really impressed with this talk.)

What a great way to end a night and end a conference!