Watch the Stars – Light the Night [buy tickets here]

When: Thursday, September 2, 2010, 7:30 p.m.
Where: The Emory Math & Science Center, 400 Dowman Dr., Atlanta, GA 30322
Proceeds to go to Light the Night – the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society

Dragon*Con [buy tickets here]

When: Friday, September 3 through Monday, September  6, 2010
Where: Atlanta Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, AND Sheraton
NB I have yet to attend a Dragon*Con where my schedule exactly matched what I got the week before the con, so be prepared for changes!
Don’t forget to check out our fan table in the Hilton! We’ll have T-Shirts for sale!

• Title: Space Trivia!
  Description: Do you know a lot about space & astronomy? Are you good with trivia? Think you know more than our experts? Here’s where you can test your knowledge!
  Time: Fri 07:00 pm Location: 203 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
• Title: Mystery of Hanny’s Voorwerp
  Description: Who’s Hanny? What’s a Voorwerp? How’s Hubble involved? See the World Release of the webcomic that explains it all & the 1st Hubble images.
  Time: Fri 10:00 pm Location: Crystal Ballroom – Hilton (Length: until we’re done )
• Title: The 2010 Parsec Awards
  Description: The Parsec Award is available for original Sci-Fi & Fantasy & Speculative Fiction within the new frontiers of Portable Media.
  Time: Sat 04:00 pm Location: Regency V – Hyatt (Length: 2.5 Hours)
• Title: Astronomy Cast Live!
  Description: Take a facts-based journey through the cosmos with Dr. Pamela Gay and Fraser Cain
  Time: Sun 01:00 pm Location: 204 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
• Title: Skepticism and Education
  Description: JREF now has a Director of Educational Programs – what else is being done out there and how can skeptics help educate the next generation?
  Time: Sun 04:00 pm Location: 207 / 206 / 205 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
• Title: Your Daughter Can Too
  Description: These women have successful careers in engineering & science.  They can tell you how to help your daughters do the same.
  Time: Mon 10:00 am Location: 203 – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)

Phoenix Lander on Polygon Structure as seen by HiRISE

(disclosure: I left my cellular internet dongle in my room, so I’m twittering sessions live and posting blog entries on a semi random basis when I can go out and find internet)

I’m leaning against the back wall of a packed ballroom filled with the brim with silent and attentive geophysicists who are absorbing all they can about the Mars Phoenix Lander.

This fairly large (5,5m or 18 ft long) and heavy (350kg or 770lb) spacecraft parachuted to the surface of Mars on May 25, 2008 and poked, prodded and dug into the surface until it froze to death on November 10. While this seems like a short period, the original plan was to wind up operations in August, so the craft had been living on borrowed time. While it is unexpected that the craft will be able to turn back off when it thaws in the next Martian Spring, the lander is programmed to phone home should it survive.

If you want to go back and see what the mission knew in the moment, it’s all recorded on twitter. Check out: http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix

Today is all about what we can now say with certainty.

The session started with a broad overview of the results everyone was waiting to hear: Is there evidence of past liquid water and is their the possibility Mars can (at other temperatures) support life. The answer is a qualified yes.

For Water:

• The soil Phoenix dug up was clotted/cemented (this is geology speak for what happens when you mix dirt and water, stir, and then let it “dry” out.)
• There is Calcium Carbonate at 3-4% level in some of the samples. This is a mineral that only forms in wet environments
• In addition to Calcium Carbonate, there are other aqueous minerals
• And, to give the most obvious case, there is water ice 5cm below the surface, and this ice is segmented in the same way as a stream that has frozen and thawed and refrozen

For Habitability:

• There are the materials needed to process energy and to get nutrients from the environment
• The 1-2% perchlorate is not a life killer
• The 7.7 pH is friendly

It just happens to be a bit too cold at the moment…

Additional work looking at the variation of ice with depth found that it matches models, and that based on the fact that the rocks aren’t frozen into the ice, but rather are capable of getting flung out of place by casual assualt by alien space laboratories, the ice is old. (Over time the ice contracts, loosening around the rocks).

There was also work that showed that the fascinating polygon structures surrounding the lander are likely caused by seasonal cracking that occurs when the ice contracts and sand and small rocks fall in between the gaps in the ice. The “flat” part of each polygon typically measured 4-5 meters in diameter and have multiple lumps and peaks indicating there is multiple events building these structures. Unlike on Earth, where these can be caused by frost heaves, these patterns are caused by sand wedges.

Sadly, I know need to go play scientist and be part of a telecon. More to come on the other side…

Friday, a little after noon Central time (GMT-6) I gathered my belongings and rushed for a plane. From St Louis to Chicago, with a run from Terminal H to K, I raced to catch a flight to London. Finally settling into my seat (39J) I settled in to fly roughly a quarter of the way around the globe.

Airplanes are one of those random places where I get to learn just how poor education is in America. As we sat waiting to take off, the women in 40J loudly complained into her cell phone, “I don’t understand why we have to fly all across Canada and then down over England. Why can’t we just Fricken Fly straight to F***ing London.” She, like the rest of us, was looking at the map that showed the projected flight of the airplane, a geodesic that stretched up and over the North Atlantic. This projection of a three dimensional world onto a two dimensional map made it appear that we were taking a silly route – but… Um, no. We were taking the shortest. This women, like so many, just didn’t understand great circles. She went on to whine loudly, “And this screen can’t be right. It says London is 5 hours ahead of us in time. They’ve got to be a lot more then that.” Um, no. The planet only has 24 hours to stretch out around the globe, and in the grand scheme of the planet Earth, London just isn’t that far around the globe.

Oh dear. Headset required.

For many hours, I sat and dozed and read The Sparrow. The flight was turbulent and my own stupid failure to drink enough gave me a dehydration migraine as land and landing approached. (Never give yourself only 45-minutes in Chicago to transfer). The plane dove through the clouds in a breath-taking dawn, and I found myself over the Thames and over a country I’ve never before visited.

Sadly, for today, I’d only see the airport. My American Airlines flight and I landed at Heathrow Terminal 3. Heathrow Terminal 3 is a waste land where one can not buy a beverage, and where passengers are herded like lab mice through an Echer inspired maze. Over, across, down one escalator, around and up another – we trudged like weary rodents hoping the cheese they smell is actually real. My connection from Heathrow to Munich was on a flight co-listed between American and British Air, and I was loaded onto a bus a transported around and around to Terminal 5 – the Mythic New Terminal. With a careful security check, I was finally in a vast plaza of shopping insanity. All I wanted was hot tea. I eventually found it beyond the Sony Displays, beyond the designer handbag displays, and beyond the Virgin Galactic display. I have to admit to always being baffled by the airport cum shopping mall scenario – who wants to make their carry-ons weigh more? Do people actually buy designer suits and stuff them into their roller bags? I guess so – I’m just not one of those people. I’m a “Please, hot tea, please please please” kind of girl. Between my flights I managed to get a small pot of tea, a BLT (that had horseradish instead of mayo – eww eww eww), and then a to-go cup of more tea.

And then, I was on a plane again, this time headed to Germany. Sadly, my luggage was not. Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is brand new – only a couple weeks old, and its luggage system doesn’t work at all. Roughly half the people on our flight (even after a 1 hour luggage triggered gate delay) didn’t have their luggage when we reached Munich. Customs consisted of declaring I didn’t have my luggage.

Arriving a train and an underground journey later at my hotel, I had a sad moment of lack of toiletries. I checked email. I napped. I got online to see if my luggage had been found. I became more sad because it hadn’t. I brushed my hair, dusted myself off, and caught an underground to Marienplatz where I ended up going to the same store I might have gone to back home – good old affordable H&M.

I just want to say, Marienplatz is stunning. On one side of the plaza is your standard commercial buildings, with McDonald’s at street level and Colors of Benetton and furniture stores stacked above. That one side of the plaza could have been anywhere – Boston, San Fran – Every major city has that layered mall somewhere. But the other side. It took my breath away. There are no words for what I felt as I looked at this beautiful but ruined building. All I can do is give you a picture.

My evening was spent visiting with a long time Internet friend – one of those random friendly people I’ve talked to over email and IM over the years. Pictures will be up tomorrow

And if any of you in England would like to meet me too, I’ll be at the Castle on Castle Hill (warning – there are two Castle pubs in Cambridge) on Friday night from 1800 to at least 1945 (if many people come, I’ll stay longer). If you think you’ll come, please let me know.

More tomorrow. I’ll be meeting friends in front of this Dragon.

I love Gothic architecture.

There are TWO San Lorenzo’s next to the the conference center. One is a Mexican cantina. The other is a taqaria (sp?). We are meeting at the one between McDonald’s and Quizno’s. See map.

If you are in the meeting or local and want to suggest someplace for a late dinner tomorrow night, we’re open to a second meetup too.

As you may have read at the time, there were several reports of toxic fumes associated with this impact, and some fear that it was actually a missile or falling piece of space debris. All these reports and fears appear to be nothing more than over-active imaginations at work. This was a rock. More accurately this was a Rocky Asteroid called a Chondrite (sub type H). This is good news, but a bit troubling. This type of asteroid turned meteor turned meteorite isn’t supposed to be able to make landfall when small. It was thought (using what are called Pancake Models) that these objects burn up in the atmosphere and spread into a cloud of small, unlikely to survive to the ground, pieces.

Clearly, the models were missing something.

This Carancas crater is/was (it’s quickly eroding) about 14 meters in diameter and the ejecta from the impact spread over 300 meters, with one chunk going through the roof of a shed a couple hundred meters from the impact site. While many of the meteor bits were taken by locals, tourists, etc before the scientists got there (you can actually buy some here), the total mass of the meteor bits and dust still at the site when the scientists got there was surprisingly large. It is estimated that the impacting “object” (I’ll explain below) was roughly 1m in size and 1780 kg.

The parent body was likely much larger. Using modeling, it is estimated that a roughly 2ton object hit the atmosphere at 75 degrees. As it passed through the atmosphere braking and breaking took place, with the object fragmenting in such a way that the pieces didn’t have the energy necessary to pass through the  bow shock (a special type of shockwave that comes off the nose of an object passing through a medium). With all the fragments trapped inside the bowshock they were effectively collimated and in many ways acted like a single object, hitting the ground in a stream. The impact contained roughly 62 million joules of kinetic energy, and flung the soil up into a really cool crater. Unfortunately, this object landed on the bank of what was a dry riverbed. As it dug into the earth, it hit the water table (only about 1.5 meters down, and within 15-30 minutes the crater floor was filled with water.

Over the months since the impact the sides of the crater have slumped, objects in the crater rim have slid down, and erosion has taken place. Soon this crater will look like just another watering hole for the local llamas – It will just be a local watering hole surrounded by fascinating dust and rocks. (Samples collected contained glassy particles and lapillus fragments.)

This impact raises some intriguing questions. Objects like this could have hit us often, but because the craters really aren’t all that dramatic, they may have eroded into oblivion before anyone figured out their significance.  Have we been getting casually drizzeled on by Chondrites on the scale of decades (or longer) and just not known it? The newly realized threat these rocky bodies pose to life on Earth needs to be assessed. While this object didn’t cause any significant economic or bodily harm (and in fact appears to be lining a few pockets with green), it could have.  This object did force one farmer to repair a roof, and it could conceivable have destroyed a building if it had hit a support structure (or just hit a weak building). Now, as we map the skies with LINEAR and the upcoming LSST telesocpes, we need to consider broadening our idea of dangerous, and look a bit harder for the rocks that just might decide to impact.

I started writing this entry on my flight from Dallas to Houston (and am finishing it in my hotel room). Watching people board I started to play the mental “Are they also going to LPSC?” passenger game. Several folks that have the look of grad students and who are carrying the academic badge of an Academic Poster Tube have boarded the aircraft. The person next to me (with poster tube) is going to LPSC (I cheated and asked him), so at least one of my guesses was correct.

I actually feel a bit naked – I have no poster tube! I can’t remember the last time I traveled without a 36″ tube making me a danger to everyone in sight. This time I have camera bags instead (which I guess makes me a danger to anyone trying to get through security quickly). I packed two video cameras, so Rebecca and I should be able to get you lots of coverage in all media this time around.

Sunday will be a day of meetings before the meeting. There is an educational workshop (which I’m attending), and there will be grant writing programs going on as well. Tomorrow night is the opening reception and than things kick into full swing Monday morning.

For now I need to get to bed. Meetings start at 8:30am, which thanks to day light (not) savings time, it will feel like 7:30 am (and no matter what time it feels like, it’s going to hurt because it is 6.5 hours from now!)

It will be a good day though, if for no other reason then where I am. While I went to graduate school in Austin I keep horses at a stable about 5 minutes drive from this conference. My cousin Zach (whose like a brother) lived on the farm, and I stayed down here a lot in the summer and spent most of my holidays down here. He and I did stupid things like ride our horses bareback in the moonlight in muddy, and somehow we both survived to be “grownup” professionals. He and I got dinner tonight and anyone who comes to the Tuesday night meet-up will get to admire the utter lack of physical resemblance but will here the total geek resemblance. Hope to see you there! (San Lorenzo’s, Tuesday 8pm – see this map)

We invite you to join us, and ask you to please announce the Astronomy Cast Live Feed on your blog if you have one. This is going to be a Spring Break AstroFest like no other. While you won’t be seeing any bikini clad astro babes, we may bring you some naked facts and uncover some planetary surfaces along the way.

Enjoy!

The GLOBE at Night:  Starting Monday February 25, the GLOBE at Night program is asking everyone in the world (which would include you) to go out, look up, match how many stars they see in Orion with comparison charts available online, and then report their observations through their website.   This data will be used to map the severity of light pollution around the globe.

Lunar and Planetary Society Conferene: Interested in Solar System Science? Are you a Houston are Educator (formal or informal?) March 10-14 the 34th LPSC conference will be taking place in League City, TX (just outside of Houston) and on March 9 they will hold an pre-conference EPO Meeting at the Lunar and Planetary Institute. Rebecca and I will both be going and we will have a very informal get together Tuesday March 11 at 8pm. I am leaning toward the bar at San Lorenzo’s Mexican Cafe on Marina Bay Drive. If anyone has a better idea, please pipe up.

Saturn Night Live: March 15 I’ll be in San Antonio with some friends from BAUT Forum at Scobee Planetarium. Join us to look up and enjoy Saturn, the moon and other bright celestial objects.

2nd International Sidewalk Astronomy Day: April 12 (I’ll remind you ) will be a day of guerrilla astronomy. Do you own a telescope? Well, get it out and set it up in a public place and plan to assault random people with the stars! If I’m not in Europe (and I’ll let you know as soon as I know if I’m going), I’ll be at Annie’s Frozen Custard with local astronomers.

Thank you so much for coming. You guys were wonderful for to meet.

Last night was reception, reception, reception, reception, and I was on a personal mission to pin people. John Mathers, yes that John Mathers (photo below from last AAS), even let me put a pin on his lapel. It was good silly fun as I went from the Educators Reception, to the Undergrads (plus their advisers) reception, to the main reception to an IYA planning meeting sorta reception sorta meeting. Pins went to everyone. I am on a personal mission pin as many people as possible. It’s a good way too meet folks, and hopefully they’ll remember and let me (or Fraser or Rebecca) interview them latter.

So, in addition to pinning everyone, (Really – If I sold pins for $1 + self addressed stamped envelope, would you bite? I can also make them for StarStryder with my avatar), we do have more serious plans. Phil, Fraser, Rebecca, Jordan Raddick of Galaxy Zoo fame, and myself will all be contributing to the Astronomy Cast LIVE, as well as on our personal blogs. We will have some audio, YouTube videos, and you are encouraged to add our little RSS feed that will be going crazy over the next few days. In same cases you’ll see 5 voices reporting different angles of the same content, but mostly we’re going to try and spread ourselves out and cover as much as we can as well as we can.

I hope you’ll all come along for the ride!

Dennis di Cicco is giving a talk on the history the building we are all sitting in. This is actually way more exciting than one might expect. Dennis is an editor at Sky & Telescope magazine, and S&T and the AAVSO have a very strangely interwoven history. Both orgs started at Harvard College Observatory. Both orgs had headquarters on Concord Ave (decades apart in time, but across the street from each other). They both (several decades apart) moved to the same 1 block area on what eventually grew into adjoining properties. They stayed next to each for about 20 years.

Then last year, S&T was purchased by New Track Media, moved to a new office, and AAVSO bought their old HQ. (Full storis with dates here and here)

I’ve read these stories many times over the years, but this is the first time I’ve heard it told. Dennis is not just an excellent writer, editor, and observer, he’s also an excellent story teller.

One of the neat things about this history is S&T’s Bay State Rd. HQ was it started as the Editor in Chief’s, Charlie Fedderer personal home. He bought the property and built the HQ onto his house. Over the years, that original home eventually got converted into offices. AAVSO is no where near as big as S&T in terms of staff. We don’t fill this building up at all. These means the old house / converted offices are currently empty. One idea for our future for this building is to convert that once home into a future home. I find sweet symmetry in this possibility.

8:46 Joe Patterson “Cataclysmic Variables, Computers, and CCDs: The First 30 Years”
This is one of the big talks of the weekend. Joe has been playing the Cataclysmic Variable game since 1979. He’s basically been there, done that, and defined the field. Today Joe is a prof at Columbia University and is part of the Center for Backyard Astrophysics.

1979 was the year he started graduate school at my alma mata, the University of Texas. Working at McDonald Observatory, he used some of the very first photoelectric photometer to study cataclysmic variables. He was one of the first folks to do this work, and he was in the right place at the right place with the intellectual tools to discover that many stars have extremely short periods (order of tens of seconds) scattered across the sky. (Only DQ Herculis was known to do this before.)

Today about 50 of these stars, then thought to be white dwarfs with strong magnetic fields sucking mass off of companion stars into a disk of material.

After leaving Texas, PhD in hand, he wandered in various directions without the observational facilities he needed to continue his research. He tried, working within the national observatory system, giving academic talks to places that just didn’t really care about this new set of objects he’d been busy discovering. Luckily, a rather tenacious fellow Dave Skillman asked some good deep questions. Dave had a home built robotic observatory and he was willing to acquire photometry for Joe.

There were just 4 stars bright enough for this backyard observatory, and for many years they plugged and plugged away, until in the mid-1980s Dave built his own CCD camera. This allowed more stars to be observed. This new technology also had a much easier interface than photomultiers (Skillman’s old technology), and Joe and Dave sucked in more people, more telescopes, and started getting as many as 16 hours a night on individual objects as observers passed objects from one observatory to another.

Today there are observers scattered over North America, Europe, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

So, the next great frontier, having conquered Earth, was clearly space. When a call went out for ballast for a Space Shuttle mission, they even got to launch a 12″ Meade into space. Their are some great images of the Solar Panel covered little optical package floating off to orbit above it’s backyard observers. Unfortunately, the little Meade was never able to establish contact with its parents, and today (unless it burned up) it makes solitary silent orbits.

That said, from these collaborations and equipment experiments, Joe and Dave and others built the organization, The Center for Backyard Astrophysics. They specialize in creating light curves of cataclysmic variables, and using the repeatable bumps at wiggles in their signal to study system dynamics.

He just said something that really caught my attention: Some Cataclysmic Variables are white dwarf – White Dwarf binaries. White Dwarfs are about the size of the moon, and these binary stsytems are small enough that they could fit inside Jupiter. The entire binary – both stars – could orbit one another inside an empty Jupiter sized sphere.

Now that isn’t something I’d never put together, and it is really cool.

In addition to CV work, they have also found some exoplanets, gravitational lensing events, and other objects that vary in brightness.

And in the midst of all their hard work, they also sometimes just get lucky. Last year, on Oct 30, a 12th magnitude (bright enough to see through off-the-shelf telescopes), jumped to 7th magnitude (something easy to see through binoculars). The Halloween date, as Joe tells it, made him thing it was a practical joke, but (as he tells it laughing) the fact that a Japanese fellow (not a high candidate for Halloween pranks) was on the announcement, made him think it was real. So, he got a satellite observation with Swift to see if it was a CV – nope, it wasn’t. Some colleagues dove through historical plates. No history of misbehavior. Spectra were taken and compared to pre-brightening spectra – It looked like an A star across the boards. It also had a completely symmetric shape in its brightening and fading. All these bits added up to this star, Var Cas 06, was a microlense. These are obscenely rare events. I think he just said you’d have to watch 10^12 stars for an entire year to see one of these events. And this one was a nearby field star that brightened to binocular viewing brightness. That makes this a very insanely improbable event.

Thanks to automated surveys, lucky observations, hard work, this 40 day microlense event was masterfully and rapidly understood.

Andy Gould told Joe a neat story about how the idea of gravitational mcirolensing came from Einstein. He’d figured out the theory 3 years before he published his first relativity paper, but he didn’t publish his work because he thought it was an unobservable effect. The thing is an engineer in Hungary somehow found out about it and became a terrible pest. That engineer (a rather famous fellow named Mandel) ended up going to America, than came back and pestered Einstein some more until it was finally published in Science. BUT, Einstein attached a note saying it was a useless piece.

That work rested ignored until the 90s. Today microlensing is a cottage industry.

One final fascinating fact: Joe just told us that an early calculation by a name I didn’t catch said that one of these nearby stars may go Lense! every 30 years. The Japanese amateur comet hunter who found Var Cas 06 had been sweeping the sky for new objects for 29 variables. Now that is statistics at work.

Now, time for bed…

[warning - this was written over a period of a couple days]

Day 1, afternoon: I’m sitting in review talk on Mars polar regions that is presenting excellent science at just the right level for an audience of experts who are experts in things other than Mars. Given by Adrian Brown (http://abrown.seti.org/), the talk’s jargon is minimal or explained, but the content level is beautifully rich. Lunch was excellent and brought to us so we could focus on networking, and the facilities are such that we can spread out and talk in groups of whatever size we want. We are in a middle of nowhere town, but there is everything we need within walking. My hat is off to the Three Rivers Foundation and SAO for providing such an excellent location and infrastructure. It isn’t posh – everything is modest and home grown. But it is what is needed in every way. They even have extension cords and tables in all the rooms so we can pound on our keyboards while watching speakers.

Adrian is showing an image of the Southern Polar Layered Deposits on Mars that looks like some amazing textile. The layers, when seen in HiRise’s 1m-scale resolution, are like color hills formed in gentle rows. When we first downloaded low res images of the features with MOC a (decade?) ago, we assumed these were discrete layers of ice deposit. Now, with HiRise, planetary scientists are having to re-explain the geology of Mars. (http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_003341_0935)(http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_001636_2760)

The Martian “spiders” (also Southern Polar Region) are also deeply confusing. Seen in HiRise, we can see these features as ejecta from some sort of jet – perhaps melting dust-ice that forms high pressure pockets of material that eventually burst through the layers of clear ice above, leaving these dust pushed ejecta patterns on the surface. (http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_002652_0930)

Day 1, late afternoon: New speaker, new Martian features being discussed. Jen Heldmann (http://128.102.195.51/people/bios/space/heldmann.html) is looking at the comparative geology between the Canadian High Artic (and its saline springs and gullies) and the Martian gullies. The speaker is a researcher working to test if high-saline water could exist on Mars and pop out the surface occasionally. We see this on Earth, where salt-water flows in the Arctic in glacial regions even when the air temperature is 10s of degrees below freezing. (http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_003498_1090)

The Martian gullies are found between 30 and 75 degrees latitude (decreasing in number as latitude increases) and primarily at average latitudes (not in deep valleys and at the tops of mountains/volcanoes). They are also found on all slope orientations (slope toward and away from the Sun) and stable slopes (with big words: the angle is beneath the angle of repose, above which stuff tumbles). The gullies also typically come out 200 m below the surface and fall in areas that are ice-poor.

Through mathematical modeling, she demonstrated that liquid CO2 can’t exist in aquifer’s where it’s needed, but liquid water can. As that water gets near the surface, it freezes, creating a plug that can build up pressures of water is trying to expand/flow. The problem is, not all the gully locations look like they should have liquid water near them. If you add salt, or change the composition of the material above the liquid. Before today, I’ve heard people mostly put forward salt, but salt hasn’t been found near the gullies. Changing the materials above the sub-surface water, however, can allow gullies to occur in many different locations.

So, she has put forward a way to get water to the surface of Mars, but water can’t exist on the surface because water “Boils” off very very quickly. This raises the question: Can water exist just long enough to carve gullies? Using energy transfer models she studies how far the water gets before evaporating. Using a computer models she found salt water (salinity=0.02 flow rate 50 m^3/s) creates a gully with depth=0.5m that goes 10s of km. Pure water on the other hand (rate 30m/s, depth 0.3m) goes 0.5 km – this matches observations. This matches!

But now must explain why dry landslides don’t work. Sinuous, incises, and V-shaped channels don’t form from this. What about melting snowfall? That doesn’t explain why gullies only occur at 200m down from alcoves and not all over an area.
Now, I have to admit, the whole time this charismatic speaker was telling her story, I was thinking about the press release from HiRise a few weeks ago about how gullies *aren’t* formed by water. I was all primed to ask her about that. Then she went and explained they are finding three different types of gullies, and the other two are subsurface liquid or debris flow (that’s what the HiRise press release talked about). She mentioned some people (press officers, in some cases) are trying to say that because their gullies aren’t water driven, no gully is water driven, but models can’t prove that thesis. With her separate models for each of the three types of gullies, she did show that different processes can create different geological features.

Day 1, Evening: We drove 30 minutes out to the Comanche Springs Observatory, and I have to say I’m very impressed. They have build facilities with a classroom, domes, pads, well groomed walkways, enough bathrooms, and immaculate landscaping. The place was designed for doing EPO, rather than as a place for amateurs to just go do personal observations in a group environment. This change in mission leads to a lot more care in design. There is crowd control designed into the flow of the paths, that naturally guides people from field,  to class, to dome, to roll off, to field. The robotic telescopes are off in the distance, but still easily gotten to for those wanting to explore. We did a roughly 30-minute daylight tour and then headed for dinner (http://www.3rf.org/Sciences/CSAC/ComancheSprings.htm)

Our not so little group invaded a local steak place and ate well and drank well and that’s all I say for fear of making you too jealous

And after dinner we did some star gazing. Some folks lasted all the way to 3am. I didn’t But, I climbed a ladder to see the Ring through a 30-inch dob (very good image, very scary ladder), looked at Andromeda through a binocular telescope, and saw a few other things through a few other large by not-unusual telescopes. I really really wish I’d brought my 35mm camera to do some photography.

Day 2, morning: I talked again. This time on standard stars. I’ll throw up a link to the site I’m creating to support my talk. Enough said.

Day 2, afternoon: Pretty Image making 101. Hubble Heritage Team Member Jayanne English gave a talk and hand-on workshop on the aesthetics and techniques required to create pretty images. That will also get its own entry later. Jim Peterson also gave an excellent talk on the history of Apache Point Observatory. I have to admit, I’m having an allergic reaction to something, and am a but fuzzy.

Day 2, evening: More steak, More stars, 1 Snake (someone else saw it though).

Day 3, morning: I’m getting ready to leave and being rude and typing while Sarah Maddison talks about different aspects of the Swinburne Astronomy Online program and her research in planetary formation and dynamics.

I’m  going to post this without images (but with links to images). I’ll add things in as I get a chance.

Side note: I think the ratio of male to female speakers is about 50-50. (8 talks by women, 5 by men, but three of the women, including me, gave 2 talks each). Compare that to this.

Did I mention it’s dark?

I was standing in the parking lot of the hotel looking at stars with Sarah and Glen from SAO and a former grad student of mine, Tim Hunter and a former grad student of mine, Tim Hunter (who when not taking grad classes for fun is a tenured prof in radiology – really saying he was my grad student is a bit misleading…). There were as many stars visible in the glare of the hotel as we see in out “dark site” at SIUE.

The skies are why I’m here. For the next several days SAO and the 3 Rivers Foundation Astronomy Club are hosting AstroFest. So far I’ve met several high-end amateurs, educators, and professional astronomers who are all coming together to talk about how to do better science, create better images, and practice everything together both in a computing center (portable classroom actually) and in the field (literally – we’re going out to a field  with telescopes and CCDs to do some astro imaging (clouds willing).

Like all good sites for astronomy, we are in the middle of no where. This morning I flew from St Louis to Dallas on a healthy sized plane, and then (with several other conference folks) I took a prop plane from Dallas to Witichita Falls, TX. This was the first flight I’ve taken in several years that made me question both our ability to make it all the way to my destination and made my stomach question if it wanted to travel with the rest of my body. After landing gratefully in Witichita Falls, we drove 1.5 hours.

There was a field of camels along the way. Seriously. Single-hump camels grazing on a farm with cow farms in every other direction as far as we could see.

Tomorrow I will be giving the first talk of the day and Saturday I’ll be giving the first workshop of the day. Last night I tried recording my practice session, but I learned the hard way that my sad little laptop can’t have both Garageband and PowerPoint open at the same time. I tried out my new mic and it works beautifully. Next week I’m getting a new laptop as part of an NSF grant, and it will be loaded with memory, so the new mic should work great with it. So… Next week I’ll try and get posted my presentation. I’m really eager – the new machine is a PowerMacPro with the latest iLife. This new machine will enable me to do much better remote recording. Up until now, I’ve had consistently bad audio quality on the road, which has made me reluctant to post some of the audio I’ve recorded. Now I can set that fear aside and record with confidence (Fraser and Rebecca, with Astronomy Cast, will also have machines, and we’ll be invading future science meetings to report live on everything that’s going on)

Anyway… I shouldn’t be counting my laptops before they arrive. FedEx could still leave me heart broken and alone on the curb with my Purchase Order.

For now, me and my little old laptop Caprice are at AstroFest and in 13 hours we’ll be presenting on the Improbably Universe.

While I generally try to leave my personal life out of this blog, this one sentence description needs to be shared: My husband tried to replace a bathroom facet and managed to catch the wall on fire. I blog to you from the secondary story hallway floor outside the bathroom where I am sitting with a fire extinguisher (the pin is pulled). There is currently water coming out the ceiling of the kitchen below.

Really. I’m not kidding.

Ok. Now that I’ve got that out of my system… Dragon*Con. The wonderful Derek over at Skepticality arranged for me to be part of the podcasting track at Dragon*Con (and he also arranged for me to be on these week’s episode of his show – check it out ). I’ll be arriving at the Con mid-day Friday, and my schedule is as follows:

Friday, 10pm, Space & Science Track: Panel – Apollo hoax theories & other Astronomical Urban Legends (Forsythe – Hilton)
Saturday, 11am, Podcasting Track: Panel – Podcasting in the Classroom (Jackson / Carter – Hilton)
Saturday, 4pm, Podcasting Track: Astronomy Cast LIVE! with a very special guest (Jackson / Carter – Hilton)
Saturday, 7pm, Parsec Awards (Hyatt – Regency 5) Astronomy Cast is up in 2 categories!
Sunday, 10am, Space & Science Track: The Improbable Universe (Henry – Hilton)
Sunday, 8:30pm, Podcasting Track: Panel – PodSci Panel (Jackson / Carter – Hilton)

The complete Space & Science schedule is here and the complete podcasting track schedule is here.

In addition to the above, I also want to find at least one opportunity to where my random hominid alien costume. (Yes, pictures will be provided).

Monday, we’re (my husband is tagging along) leaving mid-day to  fly home. Then, Tuesday I’m going to the EPO meeting for more fun. At that meeting I’m part of the following:

Wednesday, all day: Poster – It Takes an e-Village (Cain, Gay, Foster, Plait)
Wednesday, 10:30-11:20am: Your Face(book) and MySpace: Let’s Hook Up (Gay, Foster)
Thursday, all day: Poster – Using New Media to reach Broad Audiences (IYA New Media Team)

There will also be all day meetings Friday and Saturday (after the meeting) for the International Year of Astronomy, which will include the unveiling of the new IYA website (designed by me )

So life is busy, but fun (ignoring the smoldering wood in my bathroom – which will hopefully stop smoldering soon. When this set of trips is over, I’ll get to settle into just teaching and podcasting for awhile while I replace the wall in my bathroom. I always wanted to learn how to install wainscoting …

And, just as I finished this, the fire alarm went off for the first time. I think I need to replace that (especially since I just used a broom to knock it off the ceiling in pieces to shut it up – 10ft ceilings have their drawbacks).

<small>may I scream now?</small>

Anyone wanting to meeting up can find me at 6:20pm on Monday (after the Cannon lecture) outside of registration. I’ll be the person with red and brown hair and an iRiver around my neck.