Orion Constellation by davedehetre

Looking around the internet today, I’m amazed to see how many people and websites are in their own way protesting SOPA and PIPA. What is most fascinating to me is the reaction people have as the sites they count on day to day blink out. Should SOPA or PIPA actually get passed, we run the risk of having the internet we know and love slowly wink out one site at a time. It would start with a blogger here, a video mashup artist there, starting with the faint voices shining among all the URLS, and as they winked out, folks wouldn’t notice, and by the time the big boys – the Wikipedias and the Reddits – started to get turned off, we’d all be numb to what was going, and just let them wink out as the internet went dark. It’s only because of this sudden, out of no where, loose of these sites that we are woken up to what’s going on.

It is easy to not notice what you are losing if it is a slow and gradual process.

This is true in lots of different venues. For instance, if it’s nighttime, go outside and look up. I’ll still be here.

Back?

So what did you see? This time of year the constellation Orion should be hanging on the Southern horizon for Northern hemisphere readers and on the Northern horizon for Southern hemisphere readers. In a nice dark location, you should be able to make out Orion’s head and belt, and all the fabulous nebulosity that makes up M42, the Orion nebulae, within Orion’s sword.

But if you live where I live, you can’t see anything but the brightest stars unless you go get binoculars. And if you live in a city like Boston, where I used to live, Orion is just 7 stars I know are hiding something amazing I just can’t see.

Many of you are finding your own way to make the internet go a little bit blacker today as you do your own small bit to protest SOPA and PIPA. As you make the internet go black, I’d ask you to also help make the night sky go black.

Right now the Globe at Night project is running a global campaign to try and document the effects of light pollution far and near. They are asking you, your kids, your friends, your colleagues, and everyone in the world, to go outside (wait for it, there are more instructions), and look at the constellation Orion and document how what you (and they) see compares to a series of comparison charts. You can download apps for your iOS device to help, and there are finding charts and more on their website.

Today, the increase in suburban sprawl and the proliferation of cheap LED lighting are combining to erase the stars. We don’t notice from day to day unless we’re careful observers. I’ve seen this once –  in the 6 years I lived in Austin, TX as a grad student, I watched the Ring Nebula disappear from easy binocular viewing to nothing as the city glow grew. I know that we’re losing stars here in Edwardsville because I know we’re building malls, and gas stations, and stores, and parking lots, and on cloudy nights the sky reflects orange. It’s hard to watch.

But with data – with your help collecting data for Globe at Night – hopefully we can go to legislatures and go to lighting companies, and go to the people and say, with facts, “We’re losing the stars,” and inspire change. The city of Tucson, Arizona has protected the skies of the nearby Kitt Peak through ordinances. Other cities, but not enough cities, have shown we can create change. We need to keep moving forward, keep passing dark sky initiatives, and keep finding ways to turn the stars back on by making the night once again light pollution free.

Go dark to Protest SOPA & PIPA, and go outside to checkout the darkness, and report what you see to Globe at Night.

The last couple meetings I’ve been at, I’ve found myself tweeting and not blogging. Now, with Google+ a new option exists and I’m going to try an experiment. In the mo+ment, I’m going to work writing short stories on Google+ and then link them to this post.

Here are the things I’m going to try and follow. I’ll add links as I attend them.

You can follow me directly on Google+ at http://gplus.to/starstryder

(All times are GMT-6 / Central time)

Monday

9:30 a.m.: THROUGH A LENS DARKLY 
Mapping Dark Matter with the CFHT Lensing Survey
Ludovic Van Waerbeke (Univ. of British Columbia) & Catherine Heymans (Univ. of Edinburgh)
My Notes On Google+ * Press Release * Related Awesome Simulation

A New Probe of the Distribution of Dark Matter in Galaxies
Sukanya Chakrabarti (Florida Atlantic Univ.)
My Notes on Google+ * Paper on arXiv

11:45 a.m.: HOW TO BUILD A MILKY WAY 
New Insights on our Galaxy from SDSS-III SEGUE
Constance M. Rockosi (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz)
My notes on Google+ * Press Release

APOGEE: SDSS-III’s Other Milky Way Experiment
Steven R. Majewski (Univ. of Virginia)
My notes on Google+ * Press Release

2:00pm: Astronomy Cast Records live!
Topic: How we know how old things are

Tuesday

10:00 a.m.: GALAXY CLUSTERS ACROSS THE COSMOS 
The Most Massive Known Galaxy Cluster at High Redshift
John Patrick Hughes (Rutgers Univ.)
My Notes on Google+ *  no online press release

A Protocluster Candidate at Redshift z~8
Michele Trenti (Univ. of Colorado)
My notes on Google+ * Press Release

A Galaxy Cluster Merger in Unexplored Phase-Space
William Dawson (Univ. of California, Davis)
My notes on Google+ *  Paper on arXiv

2:30 p.m.: AN INFRARED EXTRAVAGANZA
A Herschel Survey of the Magellanic Clouds
Margaret Meixner (Space Telescope Science Institute)

The Cygnus-X Spitzer Legacy Survey
Joseph L. Hora (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

WISE and the Evolution of Massive Star-Forming Regions
Xavier Koenig (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center)

SOFIA: Science at 41,000 Feet
Erick T. Young (Universities Space Research Association)

Got sucked into web updates.

More to come I hope!

Currently I’m in Nantes, France attending the joint Division of Planetary Sciences meeting ( DPS is a part of the American Astronomical Society) and the European Planetary Science Conference. As part of this week-long science extravaganza, there was a session on educational programs that make a global impact. I talked about citizen science (1, 2), and otherwise got to sit back and hear about other projects, many of which are children of the International Year of Astronomy that were able to grow and continue to thrive.

From TWAN: Starry Sky of an Alien Lake by Wally Pacholka

The session started with Mike Simmons of Astronomers without Borders. While Mike and his network date back to before IYA, they really came into their own during IYA with the coordination of 100 Hours of Astronomy. During a few brief spring (North) or fall (South) days, his team succeeded in brining together the world’s population in one global star party. IYA taught all of us that trying to engage the entire planet in one 100-hour span is hard work, and some people are guaranteed to be busy, so in recent years the program has transformed into the Global Astronomy Month, which invites everyone to look up during April. Different weeks and weekends have different themes. Beyond this amazing project, Astronomers without Borders also maintains The World at Night (photo project) and is planning global events for this June’s Transit of Venus. Poor Mike did all he could to pack it all into his 10-minute time slot, but it was to no avail. He was chased off the podium 3-minutes over. Honestly, his programs needed 55 minutes to do them any justice at all.

From Mike it passed to Roger Ferlet and Hand on Universe – EU. This project takes many of the best online / digital astronomy ideas of the past 15 years and does them using real NASA data processed using an interface called SalsaJ. Imagine, instead of using a simulator like CLEA to study the motion of Jupiter’s moons or the pulsations of a star you just looked at Jupiter’s moons and an actual pulsating star. SalsaJ is now on my list of things to learn sooner rather than later, and I’m hoping that if any of you are classroom teachers using SalsaJ, you’ll leave a comment about how you like it.
I went third and then passed the stage off to Connie Walker of the Dark Skies Awareness initiative (They do regular 365 Days of Astronomy shows!). These are the folks that every year bring you Globe at Night, a global data gathering project to measure how light pollution is impacting our ability to see the stars (and galaxies, etc) in the sky above us. In the past, this has been a once a year event involving getting everyone around the globe to look at the equator riding constellation Orion. Students and members of the public turn in information on how many of his stars they could see compared to a series of images, and we get a global reading of the sky. The thing is, lots of weird things can effect light pollution. Snow for instance. If you have a lot of street lights politely pointed down onto grass in parks, that isn’t too horribly bad, but if those same lights point onto snow… Well, that’s a nice mirror of light reflected into the sky. This year, to look at variations, and to see who can participate when, they’re introducing 4 different Globe at Nights events: January 14-23, February 12-21, March 13-22, and April 11-20 (that’s 2012).

With a line up of special events defined for us, the podium (or lack of podium) was handed over to Rosa Doren, a woman who is a force of nature bent on improving teacher preparation on a global level. Working on a budget of sofa change and sidewalk dimes, she has shown us what it means to leverage existing resources. As head of the IYA’s Galileo Teacher Training Program (which is still going strong!), she has brought together a global collaboration of people who are doing teacher training and providing teachers astronomy certification (at a variety of levels) by engaging them in a collections of activities in different content areas. The thing that consistently impresses me about this project is it realizes that schools aren’t all the same in terms of resources, but the same concepts of wanting to engage people rather then lecture at people apply. Don’t have a computer? That’s ok – they have a plan. Have a telescope and the most modern of technologies? That’s fine too. The sets of possible things teachers can do is varied enough to recognize the vast diversity of classroom needs, allowing teachers to learn concepts through tasks matched to their resources. Are you a teacher? Want to get the leg up on your astronomy content in a way that is relevant to the classroom you have instead of the classroom you wish you had? Check out the global listing of teacher workshops on their website.

Algol, the Demon of the Sky by EU-UNAWE Spain

The final talk I listened to well was on a classroom project I know I’ve mentioned before: Universal Awareness (UNAWE). Lead by Pedro Russo (formerly lead by Carolina Odman who’s no doing different awesomeness), and presented by a nice younger fellow whose name I didn’t catch, this program is designed to get little kids to love and learn space science through story telling. On their resources page they have a myriad of activities (including signing activities and telescope activities!), artwork from stories telling sky-lore from many different cultures, and all the teacher resources you might want (as a non-teacher, I like to download and print the art). Editions are available in multiple languages. The story that I heard (not told today, sadly) that most made me love this project was actually a story on it’s cultural impact. Through one set of activities, they get the kids telling their stories to a visiting outer space alien (a doll sewn by one of the community parents), and the alien in turn tells the kids stories about space through this curriculum. One teacher reported that after doing UNAWE in her class, an transfer student from a foreign country was seen as an interesting new thing – a source of potential stories and friendship. This was in contrast to how her kids normally treated transfer kids, as well, aliens in the not so warm and fuzzy story telling sense.

So the reason I said “listen well” is today I also learned I’m not really all that compatible with French food. I’m fine, but for a while, sitting a bit dehydrated (beverages are primarily expresso and wine here), and way overheated (no or limited AC and in the 80s), I just decided that rather than listening closely, I’d turn a color that caused a worried friend to ask if I was ok. After the session, I grabbed a couple cans of soda (failing to find hot tea, which I now have), and got to feeling better slowly but surely. I’m now fine, but during a few of the talks I wasn’t listening as much as I was doing a mental inventory of things like water bottles and tea bags I will hence forth always a) bring, and b) not leave on the plane (as I did with my water bottle on Saturday).

Unfortunately, this means the best I can do is offer you a link to the program for the rest of the session. No fear though, Thursday is another education session, and next week I’ll be at an astronomy communications meeting in Beijing (where I am compatible with the food). I’ll report what I hear. And tomorrow (room space willing) I’ll try and get you some science. So far, I fear to say, I’ve been thwarted by rooms with more people than space. Ah well, Emily Lakdawalla is early to arrive and easy to fit into small spaces and keeps managing to fit nicely into all the coolest sessions. Follow her on twitter and the Planetary Society Blog for all the best science this meeting has to offer.

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.

Understanding all this data requires modeling how ring material – generally too small to image with Cassini’s many meter scale resolutions. From these models, hints of features – propeller blades and spokes – get generated. These are transitory
features images by Cassini that are quickly disrupted by tidal effects and other disruptions. While most things imaged in the ring are under and over densities images in the ring looking down, there are also images of vertical structures in the rings that appear in the highly shadowed equinox images. During bits 4 days of equinox,
the sun hit Saturn’s rings edge on, and anything that rose above the otherwise smooth plane of the rings cast a show. Image illuminating a frisbee from the edge so that its show is just a line on a wall. If you now perch a Lego dude on the frisbee, it will cast a long shadow across your frisbee in just the same way. (see image at above)

One of the more interesting findings has been the existence of spiral density waves in the rings. These were first predicted by dynamic computer models that teated the rings like a viscous fluid. These waves – the same type of waves that generate spiral arms in galaxies – create odd distortions in Saturn’s rings (see image at above). While they aren’t as dramatic as their galactic cousins, they are still evidence that science is the same at all scales – from stars and viscous gas in the galaxy to moons and chunks of ice and dust orbiting Saturn – the same concepts, features and rules are observed.

To quote XKCD, Science, it works b**ches.

Trying to figure out that a random green blob of gas is a light echo was anything but easy. In this comic book, we try and tell the story of what it was like for the people involved and how exactly astronomy – in its not exactly Indiana Jones fashion – can be an amazing adventure. The project was written largely by a team of volunteers from CONvergence, and the art is by two amazing students here at SIUE.

Here is what we wrote over on the Galaxy Zoo Blog:

line art: Elea Braasch, color: Chris Spangler

This past Monday, at about 8pm Central (GMT -4), a Voorwerpish webcomic was delivered to Sips Comics for printing. Tuesday morning we got the page proofs, and now, one by one, they are being made into full color reality.

We could say a lot of things right now: We could tell you about playing round robin with the script, digitally passing it from person to person under the guidance of Kelly, sometimes into the wee hours of the night. We could tell you about watching the art come to life; transforming from line drawings to fully rendered pages in the hand of our artists Elea and Chris. We could tell you how many pencil tips were broken, and how many digital files grew so big our computers crawled.

We could talk a lot, but instead, let us invite you to join us for the World Premier and share with you a few images.

You’re Invited to a World Premier

• Time: 3 September, 10pm Eastern (GMT -5)
• Online: via Hanny’s Voorwerp Webcomic or via direct UStream Link
• In Person: At Dragon*Con
  Crystal Ballroom
  Hilton Atlanta
  255 Courtland Street NE
  Atlanta, GA

Come meet the artists, hear a brief talk by Bill, and generally revel in the Voorwerp’s awesomeness.

And come dressed as a Voorwerp for a chance to win a prize for best costume!

See you in Atlanta?

Pamela, Hanny, Bill, Kelly, Elea and Chris

Looking around the room, I see PhD astronomers, journalists, educators, amateur astronomers, and business managers, all involved in making people look up and learn. That we are all here – let to travel by our departments and funded through our grants and institutions – is a demonstration that times are changing and what we are doing is valued at some level.

When I was a graduate student, in the 6.5 years I was in Texas, two different astronomy education researchers come and give colloquium talks. On a third occasion, three of us in the department gave a talk. In all three instances, people came out of the woodwork (or at least up from the physics department) to heckle the speakers, making it clear they didn’t think statistical results from education research could be valid because they always knew some example that was an exception to the average. This was horrible logic. According to their logic, I can say that the average 1st grader (6 year old) can’t do algebra based on research, but because I know one first graders who can do algebra, all my research is invalid. This is horrible logic! But, when your goal is to invalidate someone, logic doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be good enough to caste doubt in an audience. And that’s what these people wanted to do – discredit and side line astronomy education research (heck, even Sagan was mocked for spending time communication astronomy).

This sidelining of education and communication conveys a horrible message: It tells young scientists with a passion and an ability to communicate and/or teach that they are wasting their time when they do anything other than research on astronomical objects. I’ve heard it said, those who can’t do research teach.

The only way I know to change this attitude is to raise the professionalism of our field. We need to demonstrate that communicating astronomy online isn’t just playing online. We need to demonstrate that teaching based on educational theory and prepared interactive class plans actually has a better impact than the traditional lecture from notes (I remember being told to keep all my college notes because they would form the core of my future lecture teaching notes). At the end of the day, we as a field of astronomy educators and communicators have to demonstrate that what we learn from our work matters and that we are changing lives.

This is what I do. When I first started podcasting back in 2005, I dealt with a lot of “Your wasting your time” comments. And I heard a lot of “Having fun playing online?” comments. Since then, I’ve been working one paper at a time to show that while yes, I am playing online, what I’m doing matters. And I’m just one of many people working to do this. In recent years, two new journals, the Astronomy Education Review journal, and the Communicating Astronomy to the Public journal, have been created for the group of us working to demonstrate the results of our work. Yes, I’m a trained variable star astronomer and galaxy researcher (and I’ve promised myself to publish papers on each this year to clean out my data backload). But while I’m a astronomy object researcher, I’m also working to become an astronomy communications researcher.

As the population of us doing this work has been growing and gaining momentum, we’ve been taking on larger and larger projects, from becoming the voices for space missions (or twitter feeds), to recruiting and training citizen scientists, to all the things in Caroline Odman’s talk (which will go online soon and get linked to here), we are doing more and studying the impact of everything we do as we go.

In someways, the International Year of Astronomy was our two new fields’ opportunity to shine. We were given a chance to go out and play with the entire planet and make a difference, and this week we are reporting back about our successes, and we are planning how to make the best of what we’ve done last beyond 2010.

I have to admit, I have been too jet lagged to keep up with the numbers and graphs that have gone flying past. All the talks from this meeting will go online (including my jet lagged talk). Rather then do a poor job summarizing things here, I’d encourage you to look at the twitter messages under hash tag #CAP2010 and watch for the results to be posted. Read the journals. Get things first hand.

I know a lot of science communicators – journalists, amateur observers, spacetweeps, teachers, and others – read this blog. You too are part of changing this field. The journals I named above to not require a PhD to publish results. As we build our new field, I would challenge all of you to evaluate what you do, track outcomes, learn what triggers people going from passively paying attention to astronomy that randomly appears in front of them (go go guerrilla sidewalk astronomers) to actively seeking astronomy content (and maybe even becoming sidewalk astronomers themselves).

Be part of the dialogue. Together, we are astronomers.

But tonight I gave a talk that began with the reading of Bible verses I selected, read from the pulpit in Asbury Seminaries Chapel. My brief talk was meant to contextualize our place as humans in the cosmos. Aiming for just 15 minutes, it is quite short, after after receiving a few requests via twitter, I’m going to post it here.

Please, please, don’t flame. Please.

“]

Hubble Ultra Deep Field [credit: NASA / STScI

Genesis 1:1-5
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was [a] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

John 1:1-5
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4In him was life, and that life was the light of men. 5The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood[a] it.

Colossians 1: 16-17
16 For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

Romans 1:20
20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

Good Evening. I have to admit this was perhaps the hardest 1500 words or so I have ever prepared. I am a Christian, and I am a scientist, and most days I find myself dancing a careful dance where I try to avoid verbal bullets from atheist scientists and Christian young earthers. I have learned how to speak safely and when to speak unsafely to scientists, but this is my first time speaking before Theologians. I don’t know how far out of your comfort zone astronomy may take some of you. No matter what ideas you come to this conference with, I’d ask you to open your mind to learn new ideas, and in the breadth and magnificence of this universe which cosmology allows us to understand, find God in what is clearly seen.

Here on the surface of the Earth it is easy to see our universe as small and understood. Each year the seasons tick past in explainable ways, and 400 years after Kepler, the motion of the planets is just something we take for granted. Solar eclipses no longer make people tremble as the Asseryians trembled before the 763BC eclipse of Amos 8:9. Instead eclipses are just a roughly twice a year things that thousands of people turn into vacations.

From the surface of the Earth, it is easy to feel safe, and in control because we have the knowledge to understand the universe.

We have science to explain the supernovae, the comets, the ever twinkle and gleam in the sky.

But we are small, and life is fragile in this vast universe, and there are more things in heaven and earth waiting to be discovered than are dreamt of in our sciences.

Our human minds struggles to grasp at the scale of our universe. Any number over a million is simply large, and in discussing the cosmos, we discuss the billions and billions of galaxies, the billions and billions of stars, and distances so vaste that light has not yet had time to travel from most distant galaxies we see in the north to the most distant galaxies we see in our Southern skies.

“]

Saturn with Earth tucked in the Rings (left side, small blue dot) [credit: NASA / Cassini

Carl Sagan referred to the earth as Pale Blue Dot and in this image taken by the Cassini space probe, we can see the distant Earth in its smallness. Sagan wrote of our world, “Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, … every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Not only do we struggle to grasp at our smallness, but we also struggle to understand our place in time.

Our planet is a transitory thing. Formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago, it will be able to support life for only another 50 million years before the Sun’s slow increase in temperature makes life intolerable on Earth. In roughly 5 billion years our Earth will be destroyed entirely as our Sun bloats into a red giant and either consumes the planet or simply broils it with intense solar winds. We live in the twilight years of our world, and time is ticking.

But our planet is just part of a cycle.

We live on a rocky world orbiting a star that is rich in heavy elements. If you shine sunlight through the most amazing of prisms to make a rainbow, you will be able to single out dark stripes mixed in the light, many of which arise from Iron, Titanium, and other metallic atoms in the sun’s atmosphere.

To get at this richness of atomic diversity, our universe had to be created, and generations of stars had to live and die, all before our own Sun could be born.

When our universe formed, 13.7 billion years ago, it was pure energy – pure light. Within the first fractions of a second, that energy began to solidify into particles. Mass and Energy are just two faces of the same thing, and as the universe cooled, the mass divided from the light. At first there was matter and anti-matter, but through the miracle of asymmetry, for every 1 billion anti-matter particles there was a billion and 1 matter particles. The particles collided – they destroyed one another, and they left behind matter. And that matter, at that moment, and for almost the next 3 minutes, was as hot and as dense as the center of a star and nuclear fusion was able to take place. Protons combined. Neutrons were created. Hydrogen nuclei grew into deuterium, which in turn fused to helium and trace amounts of lithium and beryllium. Our theories tell us the ratios of these reactions, and when we look out at the oldest stars, we find the correct fractions fossilized in the elemental abundances of these ancient stars’ light. This is just one of many lines of evidence proving the big bang.

After the first 3 minutes, nuclear reactions shut off, but the universe was still too hot for neutral atoms to form. Everything was an opaque mash of nuclei and electrons and light, colliding. It stayed too hot, and it stayed opaque for nearly 300,000 years, but then one day it cooled enough that the electrons could bond with the atomic nuclei, and when that happened the light was released. Today we see this escaping light as the cosmic microwave background.

The cosmic microwave background demarks the point beyond which we can never observe. It is like the barrier beyond which your headlamp just can’t reach when scuba diving, or that place in the fog your candle cannot illuminate because it’s just to far away. Our universe, within this shell, is 93 billion light years across, but what we can see is likely no more than a few percent of the whole. But it is all the universe we will ever know.

And after the light separated from the atoms, our universe slowly cooled and expanded some more, but now structures began to form. It was only about 30 million years after the big bang that we believe the first stars lit up the then dark universe. The first stars lit up, the largest of them living and dying in the briefed million or so years. When these first stars died, they rained heavy elements on the gas and dust that was preparing to form future generations.

That stars could form is another miracle of our universe. There is no reason we can identify that the density had to be just right for stars. It could have been denser – and everything could have collapsed straight into black holes. It could have been less dense, and no stars would ever have formed. But it was neither of these things. The universe was just right to support stars, and those stars embedded in the darkness are what allowed life here to exist today.

We live on just one small pale blue dot orbiting a metal rich star. We exist because matter and anti matter were formed in unequal parts. We exist because the universe’s density was just right. We exist, because other stars formed, created heavy elements, and died, distributing the elements back into space to form our world and others.

And most amazingly of all, we live in a universe that is at once something we can learn to understand and something that is beyond our imagining.

Every day we are finding new things that defy our theories and force us to expand our ideas – We now know 26% of the universe is made of dark matter – a material like nothing experienced here on earth – and 70% of the universe is contained in dark energy – something we know so little about all we can really do is say we have a name for this rather large blank are in our scientific understanding. And every day we discover new planets in places we never imaged. New galaxies. New types of objects – all things we would have never imagined in our wildest science fiction.

We have been placed in a wonderful universe that is like a palace we have been allowed to explore. The rooms are many, and we can each find our own corner to ask our own questions concerning this creation.

But living in a universe with an amazing underlying physics that guides its evolution, does not preclude free will, or the occasional needed intervention. While A may lead to B it does necassarily dictate 200 years from now we will have D, E, and F occur. We live in a universe not dictated my certain outcomes, but rather one guided by probabilities, and in each possibility there is a chance for the future to be changed, either through the batting of a butterflys wing, through our own decisions, or through the intervention of a greater power – Our God – even if it is just a small voice in the dark reminding us that even in science we should have faith and believe while we look up and explore this amazing universe we live within.

Please don’t flame. Posting this was hard, but it was something people asked to read.

5:10pm A presentation will be by Dr Laurie Leshin, Deputy Associate administrator, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. Title : “New Oppurtunities in the President’s FY2011 Budget”

5:12pm Speaker is not dressed in back. While there are people downstairs pre-lecture drinking in the bar, I don’t think it will be too awful. I fear for man (or at least manned space exploration) but I trust in science (or at least Obama’s support of science and science ed)

5:14pm This liveblog is made possible by my Verizon 3G cell card and the power strip under the mixing board (and the help of the friendly person manning the mixing board).

5:19pm They are now micing people up and the room is filling.

5:24pm New slide show on screen “Planetary Science Division Program Status” by James L Green, Director, Planetary Science Division

5:33pm Getting started with about 950 people in the room.

5:34pm Jim Green speaking first, then Laurie (introducer had to double check titles since everyone at NASA is moving around HQ)

5:35 Many changes in NASA HQ. Some friendly faces retiring: Marilyn Lindstrom I’ll miss, along with Karen McBride, Tom Morgan and Dave Lindstrom. Coming in are Kristen Erickson, Jeff Grossman, Amy Kaminski, Tiffany Nail, and Andrea Razzaghi. There are likely to be more hires in future.

5:38pm Three New Frontiers announced: MoonRIse (SPA Basin Sample Return), OSIRIS-Rex (Asteroid Sample return), SAGE (Venus Lander) Go forth and steal rocks!

5:42pm Top Line budget: Earth Science +29%!

5:45pm Total SMD Budget Increased (FY11-10) by $512M. New Initiatives: New Climate initiative at $380M & Planetary Science growing $145M! This is not costing other directorate’s budgets

5:46 Bugets

Approved Cassini “Solctice” mission through 2017

• NEO identification and characterization not at $16M/yr – major increase in funding
• Cost sharing arrangement with DOE to restart Pu-238 production
• Continues to operate 11 planetary missions including LRO
• Fully funds: Juno, GRAIL, MSL, LADEE, and MAVEN
• Develops Advanced Sterling Radioactive Generators for 2014-2015 launch readiness
• Continues funding for Europa Jupiter mission

5:54pm Congress upset that NASA keeps money unspent to long. It turns out that while grants are 5% of NASA expenditures, 50% of these expenditures are billed by universities months and months after work actually happened. (will need to check with my grants office…)

5:56 Upcoming highlights:

• Nov 4, 10 EPOXI  at HArtley 2
• Mar 18, 11 MESSENGER orbit insertion
• July Juno launch Oct MSL Launch
• Aug 2012 MSL Lands on Mars

5:59pm Dr Laurie Leshin, Deputy Associate administrator, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate now on podium

6:00pm You are here now: NASA has 4 directorates ARMD (Aeronautics Research), SMD (science), SOMD (Space Operations), ESMD (Explorations Systems. This talk focuses on ESMD

6:01pm The Presidents FY 2011 Budget Request takes a new approach to goals – “focusing on capabilities that will allow us to reach multiple destinations including the Moon, Asteroids, Lagrange points, and more.”

6:03pm “PResident’s Budget challenges NASA to embark on a new human space exploration program that invests near term in obtaining key knowledge about future destinations and demonstrating critical enabling technologis for human space flight and exploration” It requires NASA to show tech works, show returns are worth it, and then build tech for people.

6:06pm New efforts to expand links to commercial space flight are a different way to same manned-spaceflight goal. Yes, Constellation is cancelled, but that is not the end of manned spaceflight. Just the end of a program. The people behind Constellation made the best of an underfunded situation; the worked hard and did well with what they had. But Obama wants to take a different path.

6:10pm Just as NASA helped facilitate development of commercial cargo rockets (Go SpaceX – your Falcon 9 is pictured), NASA will now help commercial space craft get crew (=people) to ISS. Commercial groups build, NASA procures.

6:11pm by investing in new technology (and demonstrating new technology) we can bring down costs/masses/worry concerned with future missions. This is tied in Flagship Technology Demonstrations. “Mars destination is a driving case for high leverage demonstration and technology”

6:16pm Exploration Precursor Robotic Missions “rovide venue for flight validation” While Mars is a goal, practicing on the Moon is in the “slides”. Partnerships span gov’t+commercial+international – everyone welcome

6:18pm While LRO + LCROSS had no followup projects in old budget, the new budget allows this. These missions proved that precursor missions are needed in so many ways. The example shown is how LRO’s CRaTER (cosmic ray detector) demonstrated that the Moon reflects Galactic Cosmic Rays – a form of radiation we’ll need to account for when humans land

6:24pm Asked about termination costs of Constellation. These are still being determined. So far $9B spent, but cost to actually get to Moon was going to be much much more.

6:35pm Several people asking questions that point out that we’ve gone from NASA having a series of very specific goals and very specific timelines to general goals and no timelines. There is concern and a desire for specificity. Leshin asks for patience. Honestly, I’m ok with NASA hitting the reset button and starting from scratch to define their future in a way we will believe

Gravity Probe B orbits earth, captured in its gravity well

Sometimes analogies just feel right. For instance, “as hard to find as a needle in a hay stack” is often a good way to describe trying to find a needed quote in a half-remembered book. The mental image and the actual task just fit. In physics, I sometimes feel like the hardest part is finding the perfect analogy that will make it possible for everyone in the class to visualize the concept I’m trying to explain. In the case of gravity, Einstein kindly provided the needed analogy. He said the way we need to think of gravity is as a divot in the 4-dimensional space-time reality, where orbiting objects simply roll around the inside of the well, like bicylcists racing around the sides of a velodrome. Ok, so maybe that analogy is a bit more challenging to follow. Nonetheless, in all its complexity this analogy points us toward one idea: If space were a surface instead of volume, the surface would curve down toward anything with mass, and it would curve more for high mass objects than low mass objects (and black holes may just tear a hole in that surface).

In this visualization of the universe, objects’ masses define the shape of space, and acceleration of a small object (like a space craft) toward and deceleration away from a larger object (like a planet) is just a side effect of the small object rolling “downhill” into a gravity well and “uphill” out of the gravity well.

This image of space leads somewhat naturally to a series of complex ideas. For instance, if you suddenly remove a mass from or change a mass on the space-time surface, you can imagine the surface rebounding, with waves moving across the surface as a result of this sudden rebound. We believe this is part of the reality of gravitational waves, which have there definition in much more complicated mathematics. Frame dragging, as well, can be imagined as a rotating body catching at space, a swirling it about itself, forcing a beam of light trying to return to its origins to fly farther to go in one direction than the other. You can think of this like a person trying to run around an in-motion merry-go-round; race in the direction of motion and you are partially carried to your point of origins, but if you go against the flow of carousel horses you’ll have to go an added distance as the the merry-go-round tries to carry you the wrong way from where you want to go.

The next consequence is light gets reddened as it climbs out of the gravity well. You can explain this as losing energy (getting redder) as the light fights its way out against gravity, or if you want to think geometrically, this is just like a person climbing up a hill covers a larger distance, using more energy on foot, if they walk 1 mile as the crows flied than that 1 mile the crow flew. Light changes colour because it transverses hills.

From gravity waves, to frame dragging, and all the way out to the reddening of light rising out of a gravity well, this geometric idea of space is the one my brain understands, and it is the one that Einstein geometrically built for us.

This plays against the ideal of gravitons carrying the news “This way lies a mass, come be attracted” as they fly out from the stars and the planets reminding everything to orbit politely.

Now I have to admit, I don’t read theoretical gravity papers for fun on a regular basis. Life is short, and the numbers of papers coming out each week is in the hundreds. I may have missed something, but one thing I haven’t seen yet is a way that allows one to understand gravity as geometry while still invoking gravitons as the force communicators. It is my hope that either this happens or someone finds a way to detect gravitons soon. Gravitons are massless and so weak that right now we just don’t have a way to detect them. This means we can’t prove they are there. We also can’t mathematically build a theory that unites Quantum Mechanics – the science behind a lot of particle physics – with gravity. As an observational astronomer, I have to admit, I have a certain hunger for someone to explain to me why gravity can’t be the shape of space and time while everything else is particle based.

Hmmm, maybe I should hunt a theorist and ply them with chocolate. Or coffee. Or something stronger.

But for now I split my head between two ideas – particles and geometry – while I dream of a unifying analogy.

Mars Rover (NASA)

If you’re like me, you’ve been following NASA’s desperate attempt to free Spirit, and the ongoing roving of the rugged little Opportunity. These two rovers, with Captain Jack like habits of not dying, are in part the creation of Steven Squyres. Next week, on Wednesday night, Squyres will be giving a talk here at SIUE. Come give him a listen?

Here are the details:

Steven Squyres
“Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity and the Exploration of the Red Planet”
Wednesday, February 17, 7:30 p.m.
Meridian Ballroom, Morris University Center
Sponsored by the Shaw Memorial Fund

Steve Squyres is the man responsible for taking us to the Red Planet and igniting a new firestorm of interest in space exploration. “Spirit and Opportunity” have always been prominent in the life of Squyres, best known as the face and voice of NASA’s spectacular mission to Mars using two high-tech robotic rovers. Spearheading a team of 3,000 and a budget of $800 million, the acclaimed scientist and principal investigator of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program will detail how he turned what seemed like an improbable dream into a reality. With a compelling voice and never before seen photos he will discuss the risks taken, the mistakes made and how the project’s goals were ultimately achieved.

Mars Rover (credit: NASA)

Galileo Painted on Ceiling of "Aula Magna of Palazzo Bo"

Sometimes it takes a bit longer than planned to get around to writing than expected. The second day of the IYA Closing ceremonies was filled with talks on history & vision – Who was Galileo and what was the real relationship between him and the Chrutch? How do we move forward to celebrate astronomy in years that aren’t 400 year anniversaries? How do we build on what we’ve done so that great new projects aren’t lost? And where does science go tomorrow?- Presented talks included talks from politicians, historians, and scientists.

Want to see what we saw? Full video coverage is available here.

In the past 400 years since Galileo turned a telescope toward the sky and reported what he was seeing, the technology has come a long ways. From hand ground lenses smaller than a palm that couldn’t quite resolve Saturns rings to 10 meter mirrors that allow us to see galaxies forming at the edge of the visible universe, we have not only grown our understanding, but we have also grown the universe.

Prior to Galileo and Kepler moving the Sun definitively to the center of solar system, the Earth-centered universe had been a tiny place, with all the stars hanging out where today we place the Kuiper-Belt. If we pretend they accurately knew distances back then (and they didn’t) the entire universe would have been ~ 0.0005 light years in diameter! Today we know the visible parts of the universe (which are probably less than 5% the size of the total universe!) are 93 billion light years in radius! That means the size of universe people learn in books (or on tablets), thanks to the telescope, has grown by a factor of a hundred-thousand billion! It’s not quite billions and billions, but still…

Along with growing the known size of the universe, the telescope has also populated the universe with objects that have forever been more fantastic than anything imagined in science fiction. From the discovery of galaxies, to black holes, to gamma ray bursts, at every turn and with every new technology the universe becomes more fantastic.

In someways, to me the most reusable legacy of the IYA is one simple phrase, “The Universe: Yours to discover.”

It is a true statement, and it is challenge. In the past couple years, thanks to citizen science, the world has seen comets discovered leaving their mark on Jupiter, new stars emerging from their home nebulae, and even entirely new classes of galaxies. Even today, in our world of giant telescopes and supercomputing, you – working from your sofa or your drive way – are capable of making tomorrow’s great new discovery.

The 2009 International Year of Astronomy is over. Long last the Beyond the International Year of Astronomy.

Galileo's House (credit: Travlr)

It is January 10, 2010, and IYA is coming to a close.

I’m am currently sitting in the Palazzo Bo in Padau (Padova), Italy. I am here for the IYA2009 closing ceremony. It has been a long journey getting here. The idea of the IYA2009 originated form Franco Pacini in 2002, and in 2003, at the Sydney General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a resolution was adopted to make 2009 our year to share astronomy with the world. It was to be fit within the UN Millennium goals, and we were to help educate the world in science. In 2005, our UNESCO endorsed our cause, and at the 2006 Prague General Assembly meeting of the IAU, in between sessions stripping Pluto of its Planethood, a group of determined individuals set about defining what the IYA2009 would look like. By March of 2007, a set of international goals – cornerstone projects and needed task groups – had been defined, and in December of that 2007, the United Nations endorsed an Italian lead resolution to for IYA2009, with Japan seconding the resolution.

My own involvement beginning in March 2007, when I was asked to chair the US New Media working group – a team that eventually grew into the international New Media Task Group. Scattered throughout this room are the chairs of cornerstone projects, the single points of contact (SPOCs) for many nations, and other project and task group leaders like myself. We’ve traveled from around the world to sit here, in this town Galileo lived in, so that we can celebrate what we’ve accomplished (and to perhaps sigh in relief that the hard parts are now behind us).

The timing of IYA – 2009 – was tied to the 400th anniversary of Galileo using the telescope to make astronomical observations. This town was Galileo’s home, and his house is still here waiting to be explored. I found it quite by accident this morning as I wandered a bit lost through the winding allies of the Padau city center. While trying to figure out where I was, I paused in an intersection of too many narrow roads and started reading signs in a language I don’t understand, hoping some set of words would match something somewhere on my map. While I wasn’t able to figure out where I was, I did find a lone sign reading “Casa Galileo Galilei” with an arrow. With a few hours to spare and no better indication of what direction to head in, I took off down the side street. Galileo’s house bares a rather unimpressive white facade and no street level plaque or other markings. I would have missed it entirely had a second little sign not pointed randomly at the side of this otherwise bland building. I guess in a country that seen so many millennia of history, one scientist’s house isn’t all that important to memorialize.

A bit more walking later I was able to find myself and find the opening ceremony, and now I am in the room where Galileo gave his lectures at Padau University for 8 years. The room is packed, and yet I can feel the electric heater still struggling to work to warm this high ceilinged space against the chill of this January day. It is hard to imagine what it must have been like 400 years ago. Smoke from candles and/or oil lamps would have filled the room and students would have sat bundled against the cold with no electric heaters to warm them. Like us, the students may have found themselves on wooden benches, looking up to a speaker at the podium. There is no chalk board. There are no little tables for taking notes. It would have been just the speaker’s voice communicating ideas to students who would have absorbed concepts attentively.

Today we are not too different a crowd. As near as I can see, my little netbook is the only laptop out, and only a few notes are being scribbled on note pads on knees. We are today’s attentive students, trying to absorb the moment we worked so hard to reach. In the first afternoon session, we are listening to a chain of speakers: the rector of the University, the Mayor of the city, the UNESCO Assistant Director General, and IAU and INAF Presidents. It is a long stream of welcomes and thankyous and acknowledgements often (but thankfully not always) issued in two or more languages and all leading toward the first major presentation: an overview of the IYA 2009 by Catherine Cesarsky.

A few key points came from these first speakers: UNESCO speaker Walter Erdelen made the important point that UNESCO is going to be funding an Astronomy in Developing Nations program that will help spread space science. They invite us to collaborate with them and bring space science to the world. For some reason, I had never realized until now that the world is filled with nations where astronomy isn’t even taught at the university level. There are no minor in astronomy, no classes in aeronautical engineering; there is no option to educationally chance a dream of going to the stars. Now, UNESCO seeks to change that, getting astronomy all the way down in to the children’s schools. They are specifically looking for ways to promote teacher training, and to work on building alliances between universities in developing nations and in industrialized nations. The IYA2009 was a start of achieving this work, and many nations adopted programs like “Universe Awareness” (UNAWE) for kids, an ongoing project to get the youngest school children interacting with space science concepts. The power the IYA2009 had to change nations in positive ways is a constant them, and the INAF president, Tommaso Maccacaro wants to see our work continue. In his talk, he called for the beginning of an International Century of Astronomy and this caused a collective murmur that bordered on a groan. His idea, a century spanning 2010-2110 that would than lead to a millennia of astronomy where at the end we will have “Given up on having closing ceremonies.”

(Side note: It is amusing to watch speakers try and cope with a computer that responds with menus in Italian when you click on things)

According to Catherine Cesarsky, the IYA2009 Vision was to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe. With the year behind us, we may not have reached the entire world, but we have come close. 148 nations have participated, each them in their own ways participating in cornerstone and major projects and creating projects of their own.

It is amazing to hear from the SPOCs of developing nations, and realizing how much some nations were able to do with so little. Claudio Moises Paulo, SPOC of Mozambique, detailed how they had held major events in the southern most proveniences of their southern African country, and then used TV and radio to share their ideas nationally. With just 1000euro in seed money they were able to get UNAWE in place, participate in the Moon for Mankind photo project, hold a star party for Galilean nights, and to locally put together a 50 student project called “The Night with the Planets” that got kids looking up and learning. The also have a traveling project that uses meteorites to promote astronomy and are setting up a major astronomy club – the first of its kind in their country. They’ve had some outside help – Brazil sent them a “From the Earth to the Universe” exhibit, and two of their teachers will be going to Portugal to receive “Galileo Teacher Training” – but for the most part this has been a small cadre of dedicated individuals changing a nation. They are now working toward getting astronomy into their universities, and they have a simple dream of getting a planetarium for their nation.

In addition to Claudio Moises Paulo, we also heard from the Egyptian, Honduran, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, and Indian SPOCs. What struck me most as I listened to them talk was how much of an impact UNAWE has had. This program is almost non-existent in the US where people are perhaps too concerned with teaching to national standards and national exams and have forgotten how to teach to inspire. UNAWE inspires. We’ve also heard over and over of projects to get telescopes into the hands of children. In some nations, where Galileoscope’s $15 was still too much, they came up with their own $2 plans and had kids building little spyglasses to explore the universe. And beyond educating, the IYA2009 has also brought the world stamps and even coins. The Ukraine produced an amazing coin that I think I’m just going to have to google a source for.

It has been a long few years, but I feel safe in saying that while we did not give everyone in the world an experience in astronomy, we did reach more people than have ever been reached before. I suspect, based on random Fermi calculations, that we may have provided in the past year more kids a chance to build a telescope that can used to look at the stars than have been given that opportunity ever before.

We have been busy, and Catherine acknowledges we are all exhausted and that it is with a mix of sadness and relief that we realize it is now over and now we can rest.

But first we have one more day of pomp and circumstance. Tonight, following a cocktail hour there is a celebratory concert, where I’m amused to note both Holst’s Jupiter and John Williams Star Wars Saga are set to be played. It all then starts over at 9am. And I will be here to share what I see.

July 8, 2009 Image of Charlie Bolden (credit: Bill Ingalls/NASA)

Charlie Bolden is giving the NASA Policy talk today. The last several of these that I’ve heard (excepting when Alan Stern spoke) have left me angry or discouraged. Griffin was not an astronomers’ NASA director. But it’s a new day and a new administration, and just 30 seconds into Charlie’s talk I can tell I’m going to leave with faith in his ability to communicate to my community and to support our dreams.

[Note: Bad Astronomer Phil Plait as coverage as well. Check it out?]

NASA Director Charlie Bolden is a grandfather (he talks about his grand kids all the time), an astronaut, a communicator who brings laughter, and a person willing to admit with humility that he’s not the smartest person in the room, and to admit with pride that he likes working with all the smart  -icists in the room.

As he speaks, he is looking forward to a great year of new launches and new science. He remembers the 1990’s discussions of how Hubble would change our understanding of the world we live in as it brings us understanding of the Big Bang and so much more (which it did). We live another new era of discovery.

• Kepler is finding planets (5 announced yesterday).
• Last month WISE was launched and it will bring a deeper, higher resolution survey of the sky in the Infrared. The mission is launched, the cover is off, and tomorrow we get to see the first images and see if it is in focus (Charlie points out each mission has three hurdles: Does it launch? Does it get first light? Is it in focus? Remember why we worry about that third one?)
• There is also SOFIA, which was resurrected from the desert and is now flying, door open, on the verge of having the telescope installed
• Fermi has revealed whole new classes of pulsars
• Spitzer found the largest ring around Saturn, and
• A combination of images from many of the great observatories has found the  the most distant clusters.

And then there was Hubble. Director Bolden was part of the Hubble in its first days, and as he brought up this most recent mission he teared up. He is telling us stories of his own work, and telling us of their struggles getting Hubble out of the cargo bay. These are stories I’ve never heard. The arm struggled with its weight and they had to read numbers off this that and the other things as they exceeding limits in unexpected ways. And it got worse. As Hubble was deployed, one of the Solar Panels got stuck and didn’t deploy. To protect the Hubble, hanging as it was on the robotic arm, they stopped stabilizing the shuttle (that would have put torque on the whole system as it got yanked around). Left to their own dynamics, the Shuttle and Hubble tumbled together as they orbited around the planet, with the whole team working to find a solution (It was found – there was a piece of software designed to make sure the solar panels didn’t get torqued too much. They disabled it and the Solar Panel deployed right away. It worked. It all worked. And he was part of that magical moment when Hubble floated away to take on the universe.

Transitioning  form his emotionally spoken story – his voice cracking more than once – back to policy, he declared the importance of partnering internationally, treating our partners as equals and with respect, and of building strong international collaborations.

He carries with him the message that during the White House Star Party, a cold clear night in D.C., President Obama and his wife and daughters spent nearly 45 minutes going from telescope to telescope. They were engaged, absorbing with interest the views through telescopes while hearing about the discoveries of high school astronomers – discovers of rare neutron stars, supernovae, and more, each student having their own science discovery behind their name . The Obama’s have their own interest in astronomy, and they value the importance of space and space education.

The White House Star Party is an example of one of the things we do right: Engaging people intellectually and passionately in astronomy observing and content.

He challenges us to go forth and communicate our work: Educating and sharing our results to increase understanding and passion for astronomy.

There is more coming: More launches of more missions.

And the Decadal Survey reports are forth coming and will be used to shape our future, making sure that NASA addresses with its missions the most compelling science of our time. And to succeed in these missions we need to create an educated work force ready to dream these missions, build these missions, and generate the science from these missions’ data.

To make this future real we need to both educate and do science while always always inspiring.

Closing his talk, Bolden gave us these words: “The future of manned space flight will not be paid for out of the hide of science. … Let’s embrace our future together.” He states that together we and are international partners will work on great things and do science while we educate a future generation. This is a partnership, and we will inspire together.

And now we are into questions… (Paraphrasing as close to quotes as I can)

Q: Will you be teaching anything?
A: I won’t enter the teaching profession on a formal basis, but I’m privledged to travel and communicate to people and through that get communicate in my own small way

Q: Will be have a manned space flieght before 2020
A: Yes. This will not be the president who precedes over the end of manned space flight. … We have incredible partners in terms of technology. [HUGE PARAPHRASE] The Japanese have the incredible HTV. We’re asking if they can work to make it capable of returning things to earth

Quote: I recently had a surgery with robots in my body – It was incredible! But I wouldn’t want to turn those robots loose!

If you had told me we would not be on the surface of the Moon today, I would have told you were smoking dope. We became risk adverse have Challenger. We have got to become willing to take risks.

Quotish: If you’d told me when I was training to be an astronaught that we would not be on the surface of the Moon today, I would have told you , you were smoking dope. Let me say that again: If you’d told me we wouldn’t be back on the moon today I would have told you that you were smoking some bad dope. I thought I was going up on the Shuttle and coming back to train to go to the moon.

We became risk adverse after the Space Shuttle Challenger. That has got to stop. We’re going to drop satellites into the ocean periodically. Human mistakes are going to happen. We don’t want to plan for this. We want to work to avoid this. But we can’t be afraid. We need to take risks to move forward.

…

We’re open to comment and to criticism. We’re not going to do things the way we used to do.

…

Audience Comment: I’m concerned about the emphasis on international collaboration. That seems to imply large missions. What about small missions?

A: (Summary of long response) International Collaboration doesn’t imply large missions. It implies opening doors for other countries by helping them doing things they can’t do on their own. Consider scientists in Nigeria who are working with researchers at the University of Alabama on small research missions. It is our duty to share what we can do.

My Words: I don’t think everyone can educate face to face, but I think all of us have something to give, and that as a community, if we create a culture of collaboration, of partner globally, and of working to find ways to decimate our results and value the communicators as highly as we value our top researchers we can create a new generation of people who understand science and understand how to love science.

I’ll be writing more on this later. Right now, all I know is I’ve seen a great speaker speak from the heart about my dreams and how we can work together to make them real. I’m in love, but, as Phil put it, this really was only a first date.

I want to believe.

Comparison of ground-based and space-based light curves for hot exoplanet HAT P7b (Image credit: NASA Ames Research Center)

This is the morning of Kepler. I’m currently sitting in a the Marriot Ballroom watching the speaker, William J Borucki (NASA/Ames) gear up to announcing planets.

This amazing mission has been imaging the same rich stellar field over and over looking for planetary transits: the slight dimming of light from a star that comes from an orbiting planet passing between us and that distance star.

After 20 minutes of gearing up, he announced 5 new planets with orbital periods between 3.2 and 4.9 days orbiting stars larger than the sun at orbital distances 4.31 to 18.8 times the size of the Earth’s orbit. Because the stars are bigger than the Sun (by an amount not shown in the table), this is hard to quantify – they could be very near the stellar surfaces! – He referred to them as icy giants, but their surfaces are all hotter than 1500 Kelvin, with surfaces in 2 cases hotter than molten lead! These are large hot planets.

4 of these planets are all more massive than Jupiter, and one is smaller but still larger than Earth. There is a great table coming in a paper on Astro-PH going up later today (link to come)

In addition to these stars, they have also discovered several neat variable stars: binaries, oscillating stars, pulsating variables, and more. This is one of the great things about this mission: While it was designed to find earth-sized planets orbiting other stars (given more time – they require data over more time than Jupiter-sized planets), it also collects data on variable stars in the field that is of amazing quality. This means that Kepler’s throw away data is somebody else’s science.

Okay he just said something weird I’m going to have to look up. They have found small – Jupiter-ish sized in radius – that are hotter than the star they are orbiting. These look like tiny hot stars orbiting cooler stars BUT the hot object is too big to be a white dwarf and too hot to be anything else. He said there are more than one in the field and no one knows what they are.

The Kepler Press conference is coming up soon, and hopefully we’ll get more info there.

The Astronomy 2009 Island in Second Life(R)

I have the internets and I’m not afraid to use them! Today we premiered our new wireless rig – 2 wireless 3G verizon cards and 2 netgear 3G -> wireless routers, and while we have kinks left to work out, I feel okay saying we are going to stream our little hearts out at this meeting in hopes that you can consume the best of what this meeting has to offer. Specifically, my team – the self-named SIUE Collective (they decided I’m their Borg Queen – Eek!) – will be UStreaming (pending confirmation with all speakers!) along the side the Second Life casting of the wonderful Adrienne Gauthier of the University of Arizona.

The full plan can be found over on Astrosphere, but here are my “I can only see one thing a day” recommended high-lights:

• Mon., Jan. 4
  • 8:30 p.m. Kepler Planet Detection Mission: Introduction and First Results
  • 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

• Wed. Jan. 6
  • 8:30 a.m. Invited Talk: John Grunsfeld, Shuttle Atlantis Join us in Second Life [SLURL]

All your bandwidth are belong to us.

But we promise to treat it nicely…

If you’re in DC, come on by! Activities start at noon, and details can be found on the AstroZone website.

Now, for all of you cursing me for not giving you enough warning (and I do deserve it), you’re going to have a few more chances to consume astronomy at this meeting that anyone can attend for free (and in some cases online!)

On Monday night, at 6:30pm, Brian B. Schwartz will be talking on Science as Performance.

Wednesday night there will be a Tweetup / Meetup at a location to be announced.

And online we will have a slew of events on Second Life (public events, press conferences) and on UStream.tv (public events, press conferences, and random reporting). A complete detail list of events can be found here on Astrosphere.org/events

Will I see you online or in person?

A New Website for a New Non-Profit: Announcing Astrosphere

It’s December 25, Christmas day 2009. In 6 more days we’ll ring in 2010, and in 16 more days IYA will come to an official end. There are still pieces to tie up – the evaluations will all take place in South Africa in March, and there are a whole lot of websites that need ownerships transferred hither and yon, but the public side of IYA is this -><- close to wrapping up.

As part of my own wrapping up process I need to do three things: clean my desk and triage the past 16 months of anything that came to me in paper; clean my hard drive and triage the past 16 months of anything that came to me in photons; and get websites set up to move all our cool new media products Beyond IYA.

So, today I cleaned my desk (putting all the papers on the floor where I can ignore them). Today I also cleaned my Mac Desktop (shoving all the files in a folder labeled “SORTLATER,” where I can ignore them). Cleaning done (or at least procrastinated on), I settled in to work on setting up a website: Astrosphere.org

This story actually started over a year ago. In the summer of 2008 a small group of us set about setting up our own 510(c)(3) non-profit. The cast of characters  included: myself, Fraser Cain, Phil Plait, Chris Lintott, and Tom Foster. Our goal: to create a non-profit “dedicated to promoting science and skeptical thought through internet-based technologies and distribution.” We named our non-profit Astrosphere New Media Association and we filed our dream first with the State of Illinois and than with the US Government. A lot has happened since those 2008 summer days. Chris has left our project as a friend to go on to form the Citizen Science Alliance, and he’s been replaced by Doug Isbell. I’ve left the Physics department at SIUE to become part of the Center for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Research, Education Outreach (Center for STEM REO). Phil became the president of JREF and then left the JREF for undisclosed bigger and better things in television. Doug has moved from Tucson to Berkely. Only Fraser and Tom remain in the same place the started in 2008.

It has been a long time since we filed those papers on those 2008 summer days, and the group of us have lived a lot of life in the past 16 or so months, but we still have our dream, and on November 2, 2009, the IRS granted us our dream, as they granted us our tax exempt status.

Already, Astrosphere has a series of projects housed beneath its virtual roof: Astronomy Cast (which will continue to be done on collaboration with Universe Today and SIUE), 365 Days of Astronomy, and the IYA Astronomy 2009 Island in Second Life (TM) are all moving to Astrosphere. We will also host some of the IYA websites, including Galileoscope and an archive of the US IYA website. In addition to these on-going projects, we’re also building new things: On the docket for the beginning of 2010 is a new project called “We are Astronomers” that is the brain child of Alice of “Alice’s Astro Info,” and it will collect pictures and biographical information from astronomers of all backgrounds and career paths (amatuer and professional). Astrosphere promises to be an exciting place, with projects rich with content for you to consume.

But this new organization can’t exist without you. We have bills: A PO Box, online accounting software, webhosting, and salaries.  Can you help? Here is exactly what we need:

Can you sponsor 1 or more days of 365 Days of Astronomy? For your $30 donation, we’ll read a brief sponsorship message at the beginning of 1 episode on a date of your choice (subject to availability), and for a $100 donation, we’ll read a sponsorship message at the end of 1 week worth of shows anytime in 2010 (again, subject to availablity). (donate to 365 Days of Astronomy)

Does your company want to help promote astronomy? Astronomy Cast is looking for coorporate sponsors to help fund the return of our weekly questions shows. Individual donations also are vitaly needed to keep our show going. (donate to Astronomy Cast)

Want to get involved building an Island? The 2009 Astronomy Island in Second Life needs donations (Linden dollars or real dollars) to help pay for texture uploads, contests, evaluation, and developer time. (donate to the Astronomy 2009 Island)

Astrosphere itself needs money to pay for our Quickbooks online subscription and we need a computer (I’m using my Mac Mini Original (c. 2005). (donate to Astrosphere’s general fund)

We would also like to someday pay part of my salary. Here is the dirty little secret I’ve kept hidden: Due to funding cutbacks and other issues, I haven’t had a full time job in 2 years. I made it up to within a few percent of full time last semester, but I have two grants running out and effective Dec 31, and I’ll only have a ~half time appointment starting in January. This means I will have more time to blog (woot), more time to work on Astronomy Cast (woot), more time to work on Astrosphere (woot). In exchange for me investing 2 full days a week doing nothing but Astrosphere related work, I’m hoping that people like you will invest in Astrosphere and inturn invest in me working to make new media dreams a reality.

Will you help my dream a reality?

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…