Seat 20A (by Pamela L. Gay)

On January 13, 2005 I joined the American Airlines “AAdvantage” frequent flier program. The podcast I was part of, “Slacker Astronomy,” had taken off, and I had been invited to go to AAS in Washington DC and AAPT in Anchorage, Alaska to give talks 2 weeks apart. This was something I’d never really expected – I was just an utterly average scientist working in a mostly instructional role at Harvard. Travel was what the fulltime researchers did, and what the people with “professor” in their title did. My job? I wrote labs on my computer, I built equipment in the machine shop, I fixed the telescope on the roof top, and in my spare time I let my voice play with others online. I wasn’t the one who traveled. But then someone – a few 1000 someones – heard our show. And then someone – maybe a few 10s of someones realistically – read our research. And then I got a frequent flier number.

I hadn’t realized that those two trips and that frequent flier number would lead in so many directions. From Boston I moved to Southern Illinois (I met the department chair who hired me on that Alaska trip), and my title changed to include that word: Professor. I went from being someone on LiveJournal to someone with a Blog. From Slacker Astronomy, I went to Astronomy Cast. And now, according to American Airlines, I and my travel related flights, hotels, and purchases have earned me 813,245 ‘miles.’ I’ve seen every continent except Antartica as I traveled to talk astronomy. I’ve seen Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, and South Korea.* And I’ve seen Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Texas, and Washington.** I’ve slept on planes, ate on planes, a couple of turbulent times I wondered if I’d die on a plane… But mostly I’ve just been that business traveller plugging away on their keyboard in a window seat.

But right now I’m home, and it’s a good place to be.

A couple weeks ago, I was in Boston giving a talk at Boston University. Several of the graduate students asked me what it takes to get to do all the (some would say crazy) things that I do. A few months ago, while else where, I had someone ask “How do I grow up to be you?” Well, um, you don’t want to be me. The inside of my head is a pretty messy place (so is my desk, and my car…) and I tend to fall off horses and hurt my self. Silliness aside, these questions got me to thinking, and I realized that sometime in 2005, quite by accident, I decided to become someone who builds things – websites, podcasts, datasets, class curriculum, words and bytes – and since the 2009 International Year of Astronomy I have been working in various ways to build a network of people I’ve met in real life, and whom I trust, and with whom I can build awesome things. We’ve built 365 Days of Astronomy, and the Second Life Island. Zooniverse came from Chris Lintott and I talking in an elevator lobby at Oxford and deciding to write grants. For basically 3 years, I’ve worked myself ragged doing things I love so that someday, hopefully starting in a few months, I’ll get to stay home a bit more, and sleep a bit more. How is this magical thing known as “Sleep” made possible? Well, I and a team of awesome people at NASA Ames, Capitol College, Arizona State, and here at SIUE just earned ourselves a NASA grant*** that let’s me hire a postdoc. (The job posting should go up in January prior to AAS, if only just barely, and I will make an appearance in the AAS job center). I think I have learned that the key to academic life is to reach that point where you can bring in enough money that an actual clone a post doc can be hired.

This isn’t to say I’m going to slow down. This blog post is my first sign of not slowing down. Prior to IYA, I was pretty good (not great) about blogging regularly, and with this post I’m going to try to get back to blogging. Those of you who listen to Astronomy Cast know that Fraser and I (mostly I) have gotten our acts together and are recording much more regularly. And, starting after the New Year, we’re looking to add a new video lecture series to what we offer online.

And next year I’m not exactly going to stop traveling. How could I with a Venus Transit visible from Alaska, a Solar Eclipse viewable from Australia, and an End of the World cruise sailing the Caribbean? I’ll earn my miles next year, but the goal is to not have Foursquare congratulate me on spending 4 (or more) weeks in a row in airports.

But for now, I just want to say, I’m home.

And I’ll be blogging more.

* Add 5 more countries for personal travel – Russia, Finland, Croatia, Greece, and Egypt – if you want a complete list.

** Counting personal travel, I’ve visited every state except Oregon

*** This grant and others, and in partnership with many others – Galileo Teacher Training Program, Astronomers without Borders, the Planetary Society, LRO, MESSENGER, STScI, Dawn and more – is allowing us to build a new community called CosmoQuest. This blog post isn’t about that, but you can click over there and learn bit by bit what we’re working to build. (Launching January 1, 2012.)

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.

For me, the life of an academic includes what can only be described as way the hell too much travel. My career focuses on finding ways to effectively engage people in learning and doing astronomy, and part of that is going out and actually talking to people, both from the stage, and also from a chair at the lunch table or in the bar at public events. I live in a small town, and to be able to effectively reach people, I need to get out of my small town (with a population roughly 1/3 that of Dragon*Con) and go where the masses are. Today, getting away means traveling to Graz, Austria and the International Space University where I and several other astronomy and space science communicators (hi @moonrangerlaura) will be teaching the next generation of aerospace industry employees how to communicate to the public.

In general, travel and I get along. I don’t require a lot of sleep. I bounce timezones without too much hassle. I can sleep in planes, trains, and automobiles like a champ. But today I am suffering from utter, total, and complete sleep deprivation induced travel fail. This follows on the heal of weather and weird passenger fail yesterday.

I am not an inexperienced traveler. I do tend to be a last minute planner if I know no visa is required, but…. But today has been fail at a level epic enough to make a good secondary plot on a tv show.

As you may have seen on twitter, last week I was at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific’s annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. I flew home late Wednesday night, getting in after midnight (technically Thursday) and was home 54 hours (which due to laundry and human interactions wasn’t filled with much sleep) before catching a 6:35am Saturday set of flights that would eventually land me in Austria. And for the entire 24 hours I’ve been attempting to get to Graz, Austria, it has been building levels of fail.

Waking Saturday, the sky was filled with lightening and it was raining not entirely gently. We boarded on time, but took off 10 minutes late. As we neared Chicago, the pilot came on and warned that, due to rain, we would be circling for 25 more minutes (STL to ORD is only about 30 minutes flight time normally). As we circled, my layover shrank, and as we landed 40 minutes late, I had just 20 minutes to catch some caffeine and my next flight. Annoying, but no big deal. Boarding flight 2, Chicago to London Heathrow, I got on, got settled, and had a very not-happy-to-not-be-upgraded Indian (will be important in a moment) sit next to me. As we waited, me on my iPad and him on his phone, working and talking respectively, the plane failed to depart and began to get warmer and warmer. As we hit the 10min-since-we-should-have-left mark, the captain came on and told us they were repairing one of the plane’s air conditioning units. Another 20 minutes, and we were on our way. After a sad breakfast (why would you combine potatoes, onions and peppers with French toast?), the stewardess let the grumpy fellow go lay down in the mostly empty business class. I thus had room to myself and happily worked on a grant (and napped for 20 minutes) until they started preparing breakfast. At this point, the Indian fellow returned from business so he could (not his choice) eat in economy. When he found me still working, he decided to strike up conversation and ask what I do. The conversation quickly turned to how US science and math education is really second rate compared to India and China, and (as we contemplated airline pizza) he sprung on me the fascinating belief that Muslims are the problem with the US, and that the construction of new Mosques is a sign they are trying to take over, and Kashmir and other problems in India were mentioned. Ok, fail. I don’t even know where to go on this topic, so I decided to comment on the fact that personally I find the Tea Party terrifying, and we were able get back to discussing the problems of science education. But seriously, on what planet is “the Muslims are destroying America” topic a logical or valid airplane conversation?

I arrived in London at about 11pm local time and made my way happily to terminal 4 and the Yotel, a small in-the-terminal hotel that allows you get cubbyhole rooms by the hour. Designed for people trying to catch a shower and a couple hours sleep between connections, it is clean, convenient, and has people coming and going at every hour of the day. My “room” was unfortunately right next to a set of 4 stairs in the hallway, and every 40minutes or so, the thump-thump-thump of luggage going down stairs awoke me. Still, it was at least a little sleep. I woke a final time to my alarm at 6:45am London time, thinking I was refreshed but actually completely stupid.

Packing and getting myself out the door, I was on autopilot, and I found myself all the way to terminal 3 before I remembered I wasn’t flying AA to the US, I was flying BA to the EU. Based on remembering from the past that BA flies out of terminal 5, I turned around and headed to terminal 5. Except my memory, while correct, no longer applied. BA now flies some EU flights out of terminal 3. As I attempted to go through security in the wrong place, I was turned around and directed back to terminal 3. (Circles are the perfect shape, aren’t they?)

And here is where I suffered complete fail in security. At Heathrow, your toiletries must be in a ziplock sandwich bag, not a zippered equivalent of a 1quart freezer bag. They have bags to give you and are happy to throw out things that don’t fit (I no longer have toothpaste, since that is the easiest to replace), but I absolutely could not close the bag. My fingers said “no”, and the baggie said “I don’t wanna.” As I struggled I told people to go around me. Finally, the security lady just took the bag and said “that’s fine” and put it on the conveyor belt open. I sheepishly slunk through the metal detector and gathered my things.

My morning plan had been to get to the terminal and through security 2 hours early so I could get breakfast in the BA lounge. But, after the chaos, I found myself in the AA lounge (where the food kind of sucks) with 20 minutes to spare. I scarfed a couple bites, and headed to the gate.

On boarding the plane I promptly sat in the wrong seat. My ticket said 12F (window on the left) and I sat in 12A (window on the right). A friendly mom and daughter sat next to me. They had 12a and 12b, but since they were as sleep lagged as me, they thought that was aisle and middle. All was well until a grumpy business man with the 12c aisle seat demanded his seat. This forced everyone in 12 a,b,c,d, and e to all move so I could get where I belonged. The person in the middle in the other set of seats had begun to hope the window would be empty and he could move, and he was none to happy to have me crush his hope, and for the rest of the flight he pwnd the armrest and made me cling to the arm rest as he spread his arm into my space while he tried to sleep.

By the time I got to Vienna, I just wanted to get myself on the train to Graz so I could sleep a bit. Following my habit, I asked the person at the info desk for information on how to get from the airport to the needed train station. She unhelpfully and a bit sarcastically responded that the train to Graz left the train station, and that I needed to take the train station shuttle bus. Um. Sure. As I walked to the bus station I was attacked by a host of taxi drivers asking if I needed a ride. They were plentiful and aggressive, and a bit intimidating. Making it to the bus station I discovered there are 12 buses and more than 1 train station. I knew from my map what metro station I needed, but not which bus station, and since the metro required 2 changes, I thought (wrongly) the bus was really the right was to go, so I opted to try again to get better info. I saw a friendly sign for a Visitor Center and followed it only to end up in a parking garage (had I gone outside, I later learned, the visitor center was outside at ground level).

Giving up, I turned on international roaming and googled.

I finally found the bus, verified with the driver that it was correct, and settled into a seat. According to the schedule, as best as my high school German allowed me to read, I needed the second stop. Here I should say, my only failing grade on a report card was my German midterm. When the bus stopped after a tedious time driving in traffic, the driver said something incomprehensible. Only one person stood up, and the other family I’d heard mentioning the station I needed stayed on. When we got to the next stop, I tried to confirm with the driver that it was the right place, but… It was not. That incomprehensible thing he’d said had been the stop I needed, and the other family, not speaking any German, had, like me, stayed put (and unlike me didn’t confirm, and were on their way inside). The Bus driver told me I needed to pay another 7 euro and get on another bus. Hanging my head, I headed over, but the second bus driver took pity on me, said taking his bus was dumb, and wrote on my iPhone metro directions. 1 failed ticket machine and 2 euro later I was on my way by rail to the train station, and had vowed that when given the choice of metro or bus, I will next time choose metro. Getting to the correct station finally, I found the 1 available ticket machine blocked by a nun talking to friends. I waited for another machine, and finally got a ticket.

I got to the platform at the exact moment the train I needed was leaving.

It turns out that on Sunday, the train that I’d verified runs every 30minutes actually runs every hour. So I waited. And then almost got on the wrong train. I read the signs. I did what the signs said. Luckily, I asked the train conductor and, at the last possible instant, I was able to run across the platform and catch the right train.

I’m now sitting in a train car with a bunch of 20 something’s who are traveling on holiday. They are exceedingly friendly, and all is finally ok. When I get to Graz, I’m taking no chances – I’m taking a taxi to the hotel, and then I’m going to follow @moonrangerlaura like a baby duckling.

Sleep deprivation makes you dumb. QED.

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)

I have to admit, somewhere in the past couple months I went from traveling a lot to traveling too much. I have acquired opinions about the wheels on luggage and the distribution of electrical outlets in different hotel rooms. I have visited cities spread across 4 continents and stumbled through eight times zones to the east and twelve timezones to the west. Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve gone with friends and we’ve worked to communicate astronomy to the world while drinking local beers and devouring local foods. IYA brought me countless experiences, a now full passport, 1000s of photos, and 20 pounds. Other than the 20 pounds (And sadly I don’t mean Great British Pounds) I wouldn’t change a thing.

Not all my trips have been good. Rio left me saddened that such a great city could decay into such poverty and disarray. Shanghai I see hope for, but today its pollution and construction chaos made the city one I will wait a while before I visit again.

Coming to Cape Town, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I know this is a growing nation with excellent universities. I know that it also has a lot of social issues: huge disparity between the haves and the have nots, lack of consistent infrastructure, high AIDs rates, and is being isolated in geography, and in bandwidth. This is a country that is still recovering from apartheid, but it is recovering.

All my concerns were unneeded. I have to say, Cape Town and its surroundings have continuously impressed me.

Landing Monday, the airport felt somewhat like landing in small town America. It was small, with aggressively friendly taxi drivers, and my rush hour taxi ride across the city carried me past some urban slums (but not ones that terrified me like the post-armageddon like slums in Rio and Shanghai). These slums were houses made from found objects – scraps of aluminum and random wood – that sadly resembled the hovels seen on some native american indian reservations, and in homeless camps in and near some major US cities. But beside these slums were mostly were just stretches of urban housing, condos, factories, shopping districts and all the other signs of middle class and upper class populations.

The city is very modern looking, with impressive shipping yards, docked cruise ships, and a safe and tourist filled water front. The dollar is of value here, and food and hotels are very affordable (Internet is not! I have spent a fortune on internet, which is charged by the megabyte, after forgetting to turn off my remote backup). The people are friendly and tolerant of stupid tourists, and I have to admit, this particular trip I seem to be demonstrating the definition of stupid tourist. The first day I was here, I was so tired that somehow I managed to get from the conference room to my hotel room with my laptop and purse, but not my computer bag. When I realized this mistake after a later dinner – somewhere around 11pm – the hotel found someone to let me search the conference room. My search was to no avail. I restlessly slept, trying to come to terms with my lost beloved tumbuk2 bag. I decided it was 9X% odds I left the bag in the room, open and showing the money in its front pocket, and it had wondered, or X% that I had left it in the conference room and it had wondered. I got up the next day, accepting the fact that it was gone, and asked some locals I know how to handle the problem. Our conference organizer, the amazing Kevin Govender, disappeared, talked to his contact with the hotel staff, and reappeared with my bag. A friendly soul had seen it and locked it away safe. Having been reunited with my bag, I promptly forgot that I shouldn’t put my iPhone in the pockets of one specific pair of black trousers I own because it will fall out. My last iPhone explored both Hawaii and NY by taxi thanks to those pants, and it has landed in my sofa cushions more times than I care to think about. Nonetheless, in a moment of jet lagged exhaustion, the phone went in my pocket, we both went into a taxi, and only one of us got out. Since I just got in a taxi with a bunch of others at the curb, we have no idea what taxi company it was. The front desk of the hotel, however, has tried really hard to figure out who we should call, and has left all sorts of messages. I have to admit, I’ve lost hope on the phone. No matter – this happens – Nonetheless, I’m impressed at the honest effort the hotel has given this exhausted to the point of stupidity American. I’ve stayed in hotels more nights than I’ve stayed at home in recent months, and this level of service is rare and deeply appreciated.

Beyond the friendly humans and the overall city impressions, I have to say the geography is amazing. Hotels.com somehow managed to get me in a corner hotel room for the same price as a tiny single at the conference rate. Out my windows I have a view that spans from the ocean to the fabulous hills.It is amazing to wake each day to see cargo ships and cruise ships coming into the harbors.

Yesterday, the conference released the whole lot of us to go out and explore, and along with several new and old friends, I went on a wine vineyard (and chocolate and cheese) tour of the area. It was a fabulous day and of being in awe of geography, observing goats (a source of cheese), and drinking samples of over a dozen wines and champagnes. Our night wound down, watching the mountains fade away as the stars – Orion upside down – winked into sight behind the dramatic mountains. With the coming darkness, we went to a tourist trap for dinner, and enjoyed a buffet of African foods from across the continent and the performance of dancers doing local tribal songs and dances. (It was pointed out that the dances we were seeing shared a lot of elements with hula dance. I wonder if anthropologists can track native dance styles as a way of looking at cultural migrations). It was a good night. This weekend I’ll be going up to Sutherland to see SALT. My hope is too see an animal other than a bird that I’ve never seen before.

If you are looking for a fabulous place to visit and get offline, come to Cape Town. (And if you’re looking for a semester abroad, Cape Town Uni. is solid, so add it to your list of possibilities!)

All packed up

Okay, so this is a bit off topic, but … There are a series of questions I keep getting, “How do you stay connected while you travel?” “What is your recording set up?” “What books do you…?” “How do you…?” So, I’m going to (in a desperate attempt to force myself to blog better) work on launching “Monday Must Haves” posts centered on answering these questions.

I travel a lot. In 2009 it was over 100,000 miles (sadly not all on one airline), and in 2008 it was about 50,000 miles (also, not all on the the same airline). With my time split between short 2-day dashes somewhere random in America, and longer trips to more distant destinations, I’ve developed a survival schema that keeps me sane (or at least functional) when my brain is no longer sure where I am.

Luggage

I have gone through 4 sets of luggage in as many years. Most bags only made it a few trips before a wheel broke or worse. With many bad bags behind me, I now swear by SwissGear luggage (found at Target or on Amazon) When it comes to rock solid construction and ability to stand up in the face of cobblestone sidewalks, these bags take a licking and don’t spill your underwear on the sidewalk.

That said, their are trips when tiny matters. For those trips I turn to Travelon.

I own 2 bags from each of these companies, and here is how I use them.

The Quick Trip: For a trip of 4 days or less (if you pack like I do), a Travelon underseat bag can be your best friend. Pros: These little bags actually do fit under the seat! I was flying to Atlanta on a tiny American Eagle flight – I think I was on an ERJ-145 or similar – and all the standard wheelie bags were taken away from their owners and put under the aircraft while I got to keep my bag!  It did fit nicely under my seat! Cons: They don’t always fit in the overhead! Fully packed, they are a bit too potbellied. Here are the two I have and why I love each:

• Travelon Ladies Wheeled Carry-On: This bag is really easy to pack, is very stylish (in my nerd opinion), is curved and quilted in a way that makes it a great pillow when you spend the night in O’Hare, and it has a really comfortable handle for carrying it up and down stairs when public transit fails to have escalators and ramps. At the emotional level, its polka dots cloth lining just makes me happy. The only thing I hate about this bag is that it is more fragile than I’d like. An evil Italian on an air Iberia flight was able to tear off one side of one of the handles while forcing (with great force) his bag into the overhead bin beside mine.
• Boeing-branded under seat Carry-On: This is not a girly bag. It is not pretty. It is not stylish. It just behaves well in airports (unless you need it to be a pillow). It is designed with a built in cooler for food, with a pull out cup holder for a travel mug or water bottle, and the bag has an expandable pocket in the back perfect for shoving a wrap from Au bon Pain or that book you can’t be bothered to put away. One issue: The bag doesn’t open all the way up, so getting things in and out can be a pain.

A long(er) Trip: For anything requiring a more substantial bag I reach for my SwissGear. I have two bags again, this time picked for their sizes and nothing else. Both bags are part of the SwissGear Zurich series. The smaller of the two is a Carry-On, Rolling, 20″ laptop friendly bag. The second is a Carry-On, Rolling, 20″ laptop friendly bag The smaller bag is just (barely) big enough for a 1 week trip with an extra pair of shoes and formal and play attire. The smaller bag can fit inside the larger bag (for those times you are coming or going with more (or less) than you started with). While the 20″ has a laptop compartment as its bonus feature, the larger bag offers an area for suits on hangers on the inside flap. While I would never use hangers, this section keeps my suits perfectly protected and flat. As near as I can tell, you can do these bags no harm. I’ve overpacked them. I’ve let them get rained and snowed on. They have experienced cobblestone, and they have experienced Denver and Heathrow 5 luggage handling. They are still perfect.

Luggage Accessories for all trips
Let’s face it, there are some things that just make travel easier.

• Toiletry Containment:Once upon a time I thought it was sufficient to use the little bag for toiletries that comes comes with every bag I’ve ever bought, and once upon a time I simply purchased travel size this, that and the other thing. Then I started traveling so much that I was rotating between bags and never really unpacking. At a certain point, you just want to grab your toiletries and go, and at a certain point travel sized shampoos are no longer an option. To combat the little bottle blues, I bought a set of Humangear GoToob Silicon Travel Bottles. They come with rotating rings that can be used to high-light what is in the container, and they are easy to squeeze. No more shaking the bottle to get the shampoo out! I filled these bottles with my shampoo, conditioner, soap, and lotion, and tossed them in clear zipper bag from Walgreens. These bottles, a baby toothpaste, fancy face cream (that only comes tiny), toothbrush, and deodorant fit perfectly in this TSA sized bag.
• Makeup Containment: You’re on your own. I have fantasies of an all in one kit, like this one from Lancome, but in reality I throw 4 random small mismatched cosmetic containers into random places in my bag.
• Luggage Tags No One Else Has: All bags look alike. Really. No matter how unique you think your bag is, someone else has it too. So… I bought bright pink and red poppy luggage tags that I found on a bottom shelf of an eclectic little store that I won’t tell you where is. I recommend finding your own little place to purchase from. Then do something to your luggage. The next step for me was wrapping my luggage handle in a 2dollar polyester scarf of the bright (but pleasant) pink variety. Now, while I’m not exactly a pink kind of girl, I’ve never struggled to spot my luggage.
• Travelon Bag Bungee Black If you’re like me, you stack your carryon / computer bag on your roller bag while rolling from A to B. Sometimes you may try to add a jacket to this pile. Or shopping bags. Or maybe even the kitchen sink. After having a bad moment with an escaping winter jacket, I invested in a Travelon bag bungee, and life is much safer for me, my belongings, and anyone following too close on the jetway.

Computer friendly Carry-On Bags and Toys

Never one to only travel one way, I again have two options: netbook trips and notebook trips. In either case, I always carry my handy-dandy Verizon dongle for instant online access from (almost) anywhere.

Fossil probably didn't know they made a laptop bag

Traveling Tiny: There are times when the only thing I have to do on a trip is live blog and work on email. My back loves these trips. For these glorious moments I take my handy dandy ASUS Eee PC 1000HE, throw it in my Fossil Sutter Flap bag, and I’m ready to go. This tiny bag can hold my Eee PC, its power cord, a tiny camera, my iPhone, a thin book, my deflated travel pillow and mask, my passport, credit cards, and a few random things like chapstick and a pen. The best part is, it doesn’t look like I’m carrying a laptop! As someone more likely to be in a social situation with a computer than a, well, anything normal, its kind of nice to not always look as nerdy as I am. Pro: It is all so nice and tiny! Con: My international power adaptor doesn’t fit, nor does my travel power strip. (more on those below)

Traveling with my WHOLE office: I work with people all over the world, and when I settle in to work hard I don’t want to be without the comforts of home, so I’ve been known to take it all with me. Making this possible is my Timbuk2 medium-sized custom laptop bag. This is the second of these bags I’ve had, and the first one is still in perfect condition after being used almost daily for 4 years. I simply got sick of the bright colors (red, orange, and yellow – why did I do that?!?) and bought a second one that was a bit more mellow (see pcit above). Into this bag I toss my 15″ MacBook Pro along with:

• Belkin Mini Surge Protector Dual USB Charger: Charge everything at once, cords or USB, and let’s me be ready for the hotel room with only 1 outlet.
• Kensington All-in-One Travel Plug Adapter: This is an anything to anything adaptor that works anywhere in the world. Loan it to visiting foreign friends or keep yourself powered abroad.
• Random Bits: An 8MB USB stick, an 8MB SD card, an SD to USB adaptor, a tiny USB hub, and an iPhone cable
• Neoprene Cable Pouch: Filled with all the above! It fits, although the zipper hates me.
• A camera & charger (you’re on your own here). I have both a Casio Exilm and a Panasonic Lumix (two because I realized I left my camera at home while traveling in Europe). I’d like to get a Canon PowerShot SX20IS, but that camera is a bit bigger and a large bit more expensive than I can justify (when “want” meets “logic”, cool cameras stay in someone else’s camera bag.
• Goldtouch ergonomic keyboard and a Logitech Marble Mouse: I told you I sometimes take my whole office with me! I’m fighting RSI, and this is how I fight it. (Well, this and MacSpeech)
• Plantronics Folding Headset: These aren’t as nice as the Sennheiser HeadsetI live in at home, but they work with Skype and Dragon Naturally Speaking / MacSpeech.
• A small wristlet (because I’m a girl) that can fit a flip wallet and my passport along with some cash, my iPhone, and a pen. I admit it, I like Coach products. I can be a girlie girl. The wristlet is nice because it is easy to pull in and out of the bag, and when the bag does get locked in an office or a hotel room, I’m left with something small, and hard for a pick pocket to reach into because, well, it’s attached to my wrist.

Apps for Airports, Trains, & Travel

Travel (and other needed) Software

I am an iPhone user, and my iPhone makes my travel a little more sane. Here are the apps that keeping me going from gate to gate:

• Xpense Tracker: An easy way to log how much you actually spent while away. (In my case, it allows me to answer the age old question of how much did my Illinois State per diem not pay for). Best Feature: You can take photo’s of receipts. Photos won’t work for all accounting departments, but…
• Trip Deck: This travel software helps you find gates, baggage carrousels, check on delayed flights, and it even helps you find alternate flights so that when you look sadly at the gate keeper you can ask “Can you please rebook me on flight X” rather then simply asking “Can you get me there today?.” This software can be tied to a TripIt account (be my friend?) and allows you to input all your travel plans just by emailing your flight plans from your airline or online service to TripIt (works with flights, hotels, and rental cars). This software has saved me from digging through emails for confirmation numbers while standing in line, and that alone makes it worth it. (Don’t want to pay for TripDeck? Check out FlightTrack)
• Best Camera: Take pictures with your phone? Want to tweak them before you Twitter them? Best Camera does what you need. It links directly to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.
• Stanza: I love real books, but sometimes they are impractical. (Like those trips when I’m already carrying my whole office with me and have lots of walking to do). For times when digital is my only option, I click on Stanza. Get both new titles for a cost, and thousands of older (or independent) books for free. (They have the Guttenburg Project books all online to download for free!) I also use the free Classics app, but it has limited titles.
• WordPress: Sometimes you just gotta blog while standing on a crowded train.
• Twitterific (for simple needs) and TweetDeck (for lists and tracking too many things at once): May the twitter be with you. There are many options. These are ones I use.

So this is how I live: All packaged up in products from Amazon (this is what happens when you travel too much to go to the mall. I’ve included links to all the products I live by, and if you decide to live by them too, can you use the links here? They are tied to an Amazon Associates account and all proceeds will help pay for this blogs webhosting and the occasional latte in an airport.

Safe Travels

Standard Disclaimer: I bought all of these purchasers after doing my own research. I’ve used them and no one has asked me for this review. I’m simply trying to save you the problem solving I’ve faced. The links above are Amazon links, and all proceeds for anything you buy will be used to offset the cost of airport food.

Steam Punk Boba Fett

Last week I had the opportunity to go to Dragon*Con, where I slept too little and ran real hard. It was good, but I have to admit it is all a blur of images and emotions. When I try to think of those 4 days in Atlanta, my brain responds with flickering fragments of moments.

I’ve posted many of my pictures on flickr. Others are doing the same. I’m sure the story is documented (perhaps too well), and if you have images, can you please share links through the comments?

Fragments:

Masala Skeptic and I at "A Full Moon for Cancer"

• A Full Moon for Cancer: On the Thursday night prior to D*C, Phil Plait and I took part in a charity star party to raise money for the American Cancer Society. This event was in memory of Jeff Medkeff, the Blue Collar Scientist. Jeff was a blogger and amateur astronomer I had only known through the internet, but whom I respected at a distance for his work. He died last August of cancer, leaving behind a legacy of asteroid discoveries and of amateur astronomers trained to be better at their craft thanks to his efforts. Over the past year I’ve gotten to know one of Jeff’s friends, Mark, fairly well, and I was honored to get to read Mark’s words to the gathered crowd. What Mark wrote was honest, and from the heart, and they were beautiful.
• Costume Search: Thinking I was being smart, I bought a costume at CONvergence from a dealer who was at D*C. This way I would only need to carry it home from D*C. There was only one flaw in my logic: I never asked her what booth she would be selling in at D*C! One hour of searching and 4 vender rooms later I found her tucked in a corner with her beautiful handmade puppets, my costume hidden behind curtains. The costume fit perfectly, but has a mysterious french bustle I still haven’t figured out.
• A moment of Hair: I have never been one to confine hair dye to a “found in nature” palette of colors. I like reds and oranges and have pushed into maroon and purple on forays of hair exploration. Dragon*Con is one of the few places hair color is consistently not mocked. Sadly, I didn’t have a chance to dye my hair prior to departure (nor was I sure I wanted to have weird hair for a charity). Luckily, Carrie Iwan came to my hair’s rescue. In an evening of conversation and coloring, a group of us talked, laughed and dyed (for me it was red and black highlights). While the hair dye was fabulous, what makes it memorable was the sitting around with friends (new and old) and being intelligent, feeling individuals. Late night talks are good, and this trip was filled with them.
• The Parsecs: Saturday night was insane. I was booked to run madly from a talk on the Big Bang (which was to a packed room!), to a panel I was MC’ing that contained friends Phil Plait and Seth Shostak, to the Parsecs where I was giving out two awards and a couple of Galileoscopes as door prizes. It was Run, Run, Run. Literally. To get from the panel with Phil and Seth to the Parsecs I had to scramble from the basement of the Hilton to its second floor, across the sky bridge, across the Marriott, up two escalators, across another bridge, thru the food court, across the Hyatt lobby, and into the basement. (Somehow I went up 4 flights to go down only 1, to both end and begin in basements). I arrived at the Parsecs the moment the categories I was to announce were called, and as I dashed onto the stage, I was told by John Cmar, “BTW – you one a Parsec earlier!”. Ummmmm – WOW. The thing is, it wasn’t really me who won it, but rather it was a collaboration of literally 100s. This Parsec, in the category of “Best Infotainment” went out to the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, a community project born out of the International Year of Astronomy. I was blown away, but managed to give away the Galileoscopes and announce the winners in two fiction podcast categories without hyperventilating on stage. It was a fabulous night that ended in celebratory drinking (and eventually midnight diner food) with friends.
• May I have your autograph please?:
  

  Felicia Day and a Galileoscope!

  If you know me, you know I have no qualms making a fool of myself in the name of promoting IYA and astronomy. For me, I will stare shyly from a distance at the actors of my favorite shows. For IYA, I’ll march right up and ask if I can have their photo with a Galileoscope. Thanks to an intro from Phil Plait, I actually got to walk up to New Media master and actress Felicia Day (of The Guild, Dr Horrible, and now Dollhouse) to get a Galileoscope celebrity pict. She did me one better than a photo though – she signed the box for charity. This gave Phil and me an idea. Our friend Kevin Grazier is science advisor for Battlestar Galactica (and other shows). We asked him if he could help get BSG actors to sign our box. Thanks to Kevin I got to talk astronomy with these actors and get their signatures on a Galileoscope box. The best part was, Michael Hogan (the XO on the newest BSG version) had heard of the Galileoscope! The box (containing a telescope!) will be auctioned for charity as soon as I get an eBay page set up. Stay Tuned!
• Of Singing Tesla Coils and Friends: The last full day of the Con played host to the Mad Scientist Ball. This was my third time trying to attend and the first time I succeeded in making it in before the fire marshalls blocked the entrance. The high light of the night is the Singing Tesla Coils. I won’t try and explain. Just watch the video below and imagine a 1-hour set. Afterward, I spent the evening with the podcasting and science crew, better getting to know Mur Lafferty (whose button for “I should be writing” from two years ago is a constant reminder on my board), Laura from JWST, who is maturing from a shy speaker into a skilled science communicator one Con at a time, and Laura’s husband and Parsec MC John Cmar. Between us we ranged topics and we talked late into the night.
  
• The day of lost things: Faced with too little sleep, Monday hit me like a wall. Having a bad email day didn’t help. I got up for a 10am recording of Brazilianisms, raced back to my room to pack only to get a text that I was supposed to be on a panel on being a women in science (YIKES – they left it off my official schedule), to race back to actually finish packing, to trying to pack up the IYA booth (and realizing I can’t carry box + sign + hat, and resorting to only carrying box), to trying to FedEx a box, to failing to FedEx due to Labor Day, to giving a talk, to racing off to be interviewed, to racing to plane, to realizing my hat and sign were still at the booth in Atlanta, to sleeping. UGH it was a long ugly, racing day. I don’t think I said good bye to anyone as I dashed to Marta with my box and my bags and a heavy inbox.

But now I’m on the road again, 3000 miles away in San Francisco. It is another day, and yet another city. Strangely, my hotel room – another Starwood hotel – looks absolutely identical.

Dragon*Con was fabulous. But it is over. And some of my dearest Con friends I didn’t get to spend time with at all. To fast it flew. But next year, I will say yes less and breath more as I speed walk instead of spring from Friday to Monday. Dragon*Con 2010, I will be with you.

And I’d like to leave you with one final video from D*C 2007 that just makes me laugh.
]]> http://www.starstryder.com/2009/09/14/dragoncon-retrospective/feed/ 7 http://www.starstryder.com/2009/08/04/and-on-a-personal-note-at-iau/ http://www.starstryder.com/2009/08/04/and-on-a-personal-note-at-iau/#comments Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:59:57 +0000 pamela http://www.starstryder.com/?p=986 A few random comments:

We just had a brief potential moment of food and drink. People from countries derived from the UK politely attempted to line up (queue), while others, um, did not. A few lucky people got food (including cake!), wine or beer, and even juice or soda by the can. They other 1300 people looked sad. This has been a regular occurrence, with the food and beverages providing only being sufficient for a few hundred (or far far fewer!) people. This is a serious problem that I have thwarted only by being a member of the press. The press room has a constant supply of bottled water.

Anyway – On a more positive note, can I just say it is a blast seeing almost everyone in T-shirts and casual cloths? Kevin Marvel, Pres of the AAS, is in a Hawaiian style shirt. There are all sorts of geek shirts I’ve never seen everywhere. Must ask for websites

My only real, and not fixable unless I walk away from my keyboard, problem is not knowing what the other bloggers/twitters look like in real life! I saw Carolune yesterday, but I keep looking at name badges trying to spot OrbitingFrog, but have so far failed. Oh well, I guess I need to stand up and be social.

The image above comes from the last day of the meeting. A fan of Astronomy Cast who we’d corresponded with before offered to show me some of the city. It was a fabulous adventure.

I’m currently at the XXVII General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Rio de Janeiro. For the next two weeks, astronomers from all around the globe will converge on the SulAmerica Convention Center.

I’m here to represent the USA in Special Session 2: The International Year of Astronomy. I have 12 minutes this afternoon to communicate all the IYA events in the USA, ranging from NASA events to Independent events to movie events, to everything else, including all of new media. In 12 minutes. I feel like I’m preparing as 12 course sampling menu, where no one item is enough to sate you, but taken together you feel a bit plump.

I arrived mid-day yesterday, and I have to admit that I’m still trying to process my impressions. Rio is a huge city! The population is 10 million. It is also a poor city. I took a taxi from the airport to my hotel in Cococabana. Along the way we through mile after mile of slums. I’d heard about the slums, but seeing them was a powerful things. There was a boy grazing a horse under a high way over pass, and a few minutes later I saw more horses grazing along a river covered in trash while kids played in a dusty lot between shambled buildings that often lacked roofs and windows.

This morning I learned that several of the male astronomers have already been mugged, at least one at gun point, within a block of the strip along which all our hotels are located. The message – Do Not Go Out After Dark – is being repeated over and over. But the meeting ends at 5:30pm and is set behind the mountains by 6pm. I think I just may be having dinner in my hotel room tonight.

But within the convention center, this is an astronomy conference like any other, just bigger. If anything, the population is younger than I’m used to (One senior astronomer quipped that most people her age probably opted to stay home and stay safe). There are row after row after row of posters, and room after room of parallel sessions. Talks are being given on every topic within astronomy, and representatives are here from all the space agencies, Astronomy Science Organizations (like NOAO and NRAO), and professional societies of the world. I’ve now heard 4 talks in 4 different accents (all talks are given in English). There are only 2 things marking the meeting as a bit different: There are seriously fewer laptops than I have seen in recent years (we were advised not to bring a computer unless we had to), and people not presenting are dressed very casually (T-shirts on tenured faculty! Again, we were recommended to dress down).

Throughout the week I’m going to try and blog and twitter highlights of the meeting. The rest of today and tomorrow morning is all IYA all the time. Then it will be science. And I’m going to try and bring as much of the science to you as I can. That said, I’m just one person and there is a lot going on. Want a fuller picture of what’s going on? Check out the full list of bloggers and twitters over on Orbiting Frog.

(Pictures will be added, so look back later)

The phrase “Eclipse of the Century” sounds a bit pretentious, but with this summer’s eclipse that phrase actually applied. This eclipse had the longest totality time that will occur during this century thanks to the lucky combination of the moon being about as close as it gets to the Earth and Sun being about as far as it gets from the earth. This meant the Sun appeared (if measured very carefully) especially small, while the moon (if measured very carefully) appeared especially large, allowing for a longer then normal period of totality. This eclipse also had the potential to be seen by more people than any other eclipse in recent memory. Starting over India and ending just shy of South America, this eclipse passed over India, China, the ocean just south of Japan, and continued to the Marshall and Gilbert Islands.

I was part of the “Eclipse of the Century” tour as one of their lecturers. Our boat was going to try and be on the center line somewhere around 130 degrees E, on our way traveling from Japan to Shanghai. It was a risk – weather was slatted to be bad everywhere and we were slatted to be at the place with the best statistical chance of good weather (something like 50% chance of good weather).

Can I just say that I hate probabilities?

The day of the eclipse I took a look out the portal a few minutes before sunrise and decided I could sleep a bit longer. The sky was solid gray. These were not the type of clouds that bring beautiful sunrises. These were the type that bring gross mornings best spent in bed with a large dog. Failing to have a dog, I just slept a bit more. Getting up an hour later, I grabbed coffee and headed to the deck.

I have never seen a sorrier group of damp individuals as I saw that morning. We tried a ran dance (mostly to amuse our wet beleaguered crowd). We tried cursing. We tried laughing. I don’t think there was any actual crying. But…. well… Let the pictures tell the story. (Not all mine.)

[IMAGES COMING - I'm on a connection that doesn't let me get images uploaded]

But food and tram rides aren’t the major things one goes to Nagasaki to see.

20 years from now there are three things I’m certain I’ll remember: The day of the eclipse, eating fugu in a sushi shop that slaughtered the food swimming in front of us, and visiting the Nagasaki Peace memorial at the site of the Nagasaki atomic bomb impact.

I’m still without words. My mind is filled with images: cluster after cluster of 100 oragami cranes, hung in random streams in the public atrium; melted glass bottles from near the impact site; statues of angels from a church that had parts of its entrance somehow left standing; images of radiation poison bodies that continue to haunt me; and the meditation ares. There is section of the memorial where they encourage you to meditate or pray where you walk through a weaving walk between walls looked like cedar planking, but it was hand molded cement, where the builders had pounded in cedar planks, one set after another, to make lasting walls. I don’t know why this one aspect struck me, and stuck with me, but touching the walls and feeling them cold and solid under my hands … it is a strong memory.

Rather than try and say more, I’m just going to add snapshots (When I’m on better internet tonight) and tell you that if you are American or Japanese, this should be a trip you make; if you are in a country that has nuclear weapons, this is a trip you should make; if you care about not repeating the past, this is a trip you should make.

On July 15th, I flew from St Louis, MO (38° 45′ N, 90° 23′ W) to Shanghai, China (31° 14′ N, 121° 29′ E), traveling 11 timezones and ~148 degrees around the globe. I was on my way to join the Eclipse of the Century tour group to board the Costa Allegra and chase what was the longest eclipse of this century, at just over 6 minutes. Along the way we would explore the South Korean island of Cheju (also spelled Jeju), and the Japanese cities of Fukuoka, Nagasaki, and Kagoshima. After the last of these cities we headed down the eclipse path center line to 126°E, before heading back to Shanghai and flights home. This trip wasn’t pure astro-tourism for me. I was onboard as one of the two lecturers, along with fellow new media / Galaxy Zoo collaborator Chris Lintott.

For me, I have to admit that with the exception of Nagasaki, each day on land was dedicated to seeing a little bit of what was easily walkable and then finding really good food. Our nightly lectures were generally held right at as the boat prepared to leave port, and we couldn’t run the risk that a late return from sort of a tour would prevent us from being prepared. (Ok, so that’s mostly just a convenient truth – getting really good Asian food was one of my personal goals on this trip.) This post is dedicated to these silly days of food and site seeing.

Cheju

Mid-way through our first full day at sea we pulled into port at the volcanic island of Cheju. Over lunch, I remember seeing random volcanic bits sticking up out of the sea. A group of 6 of us took a pair of taxis to the Samseonghyeol (Caves of the Three Caves) Shrine where three of the Gods of the islands are said to have emerged from their underground caves. Among the trees we were mocked by magpies while enjoying rock gardens and shrines. From the shrine, we walked to one of the city’s non-tourist markets where we explored aisles of fish tanks, fresh fruits, spices, and meats. Some members of our group almost lost their lunch when they saw some tube worms (not pictured) writhing in a tray next to a little old women gutting fish, but I am proud to say I made it through okay, waiting to loose my stomach until a few days later. Heading back to the ship, we stopped for kimchi and and fish, buying some fruit wine and wishing we could get the magnificent cooking mushrooms through customs.

Fukuoka

Overnight the ship sailed smoothly to Fukuoka, Japan, arriving while we slept. Japenese immigration demanded our presence by 9:30am, something we hadn’t quite expected, and we found ourselves on shore with not too much of a plan. At the suggestion of our map, we went to explore the largest wooden Budda in Japan, along with a beautiful set of temples and Japanese Gardens. On our way back, we stopped at a random sushi place that advertised Fugu, and enjoyed a possibly suicidal lunch. It was a really fabulous experience but I do admit I learned I like my food more than a few minutes dead. We sat at a bar that wrapped around a large, divided fish tank that contained cuttle fish, eel, lobsters, shrimp, and many fish I couldn’t easily identify. Between us and the fish was a walking area just big enough for a friendly older woman to bring us our food, or for the sushi cook to come out and capture the next thing he prepared to cook. It was in watching him slaughter the next groups food that I learned a) cuttlefish do make noise while being killed, b) fish can flop in the most fantastic ways even after being slit open, and c) I would rather my food was dead enough that I don’t have this random fear that my Sashimi will flop. Nonetheless – I love sushi and that was one of my best meals ever.

Nagasaki
I’m going to write a separate post on this city later

Kagoshima

From Nagasaki we sailed through really choppy seas toward our final Japanese port of Kagoshima. It was that night that I learned the fullness of meaning behind the phrase “The British Stiff Upper Lip.” After dinner, Chris and I were holding a Cafe Scientifique while the boat wildly swayed. As time passed, I started counting the minutes as my stomach started flipping. Looking at Chris, he started looking a bit glazed over, and a few people started looking a bit less animated than normal. With 20 minutes to go, I realized I had a choice, leave before or after my stomach exploded. I fled. Chris managed to make it until the end of the lecture, but the next day, while I searched a Japanese pharmacy for motion sickness medicine, he related how he’d commented after I left that people looked a bit green and offered to end early. Everyone claimed to be fine, and while he just kept hold of his own stomach, he and the audience bullied on. I’ve since had numerous reports of people being motion sick, and I’ve decided it takes a special kind of courage to put the possibility of puking in public ahead of the embarrassment of leaving a public astronomy discussion early.

I am fine, and thanks to that pharmacy in Kagoshima, I stayed fine. In addition to shopping in the Pharmacy, I also hit a nik nak shop to do my tourist shopping, and along with Chris hunted free wi fi. (iPhones make it easy). We finally found it and perched in a mall to frantically download weather reports and check through our email. Along the way we also stopped at a Shinto Shrine where several of us got our fortunes. Two of them actually said the clouds would clear, making our trials worth it, and mine said a shadow would pass across the sun as my journeys were good ones. With our hopes raised (or at least amused), we headed for one final sushi lunch before going back to one final night on the boat before the eclipse of the century.

Let’s just say we woke to rain… Here is a taste of our experience. The full story will come in part 3 of this post series. Have you ever had the Sun and clouds so clearly smile down on you before? (image credit Morgan)

20 million people in one place; it is amazing. There are the negatives: exceedingly aggressive beggers, horrible smog, frightening traffic. But at the same time there is an awesomeness to the sheer scale of humanity at this high a density.

I’m here to see the July 22 Solar Eclipse. In Chinese lore this is a Dragon consuming the Sun. In pre-modern times, people would bang pots and launch fireworks and otherwise make a fuss and a commotion to get the Dragon to give the sun back.

The image of an eclipse ending in a dragon essentially vomiting the sun is a bit disturbing, but it is still one of my favorite non-scientific explanations for what is going on.

In a few hours I’ll be boarding a cruise ship, the Costa Allegra, to head out to sea. Here is to clear skies and hungry dragons.

I’ve reached the point of “Wow – it’s not going to calm down, is it?” and I’m going to try and force myself to budget time to blog since it is clear that free time no longer exists (or at least free time not spent with the newest member of our household – my horse Skye)

In this first blog post (which will be followed in short order by at least two more posts on MS Faculty Summit and the upcoming Solar Eclipse I’m going to go see) I want to actually pause a moment to sing the praises of American Airlines.

This year I’m flying *a lot*. So far in 2009, I’ve been to Oxford twice, Long Beach, Pasadena, Ontario (CA), Seattle, Kansas City, Princeton, NEAF (outside of New York), Houston, and probably a few more places I’ve flown to and forgotten. Through it all I’ve faced my share of delays, spent one night stranded in Chicago, and ran across Dallas more than once. Through it all, I’ve flown American Airlines in a desperate attempt to at least get consistent frequent flier miles. American isn’t showy – food isn’t free on domestic, and there is no free wireless in any of the terminals I’ve encountered. Their aircraft aren’t splashy, the seats are small, but – they are affordable and in the face of all sorts of chaos they’ve never been rude, and they’ve always tried to help me. I’ve flown United before (but won’t again unless forced); they’ve misplaced my dog, verbally abused me, and generally been rude and offered all sorts of surprises of the not-so-nice variety with excuses instead of apologies. I’ve flown Southwestern, and have no complaints, but they don’t exactly go to Heathrow. American Airlines – they’re my carrier.

And I’m going to stay their client because of what they did Friday. I made a big air flight booking mistake. I’m currently at MS Faculty Summit in Seattle. This meeting ends Tuesday. I have to be in Shanghai Thursday afternoon. No big deal. Plenty of time. Um… No… Wrong. I let MS and the Eclipse tour both book me flights (on American Airlines) and didn’t pay too much attention until about a month ago when I had the horrible realization that I didn’t get back to St Louis until after my flight to Shanghai had already left Chicago! I called American and the person I got said she was very sorry, but to rebook everything would cost $2k. Yes, $2,000. So I got sad and booked a 1 way ticket on a different (cheaper) carrier that would allow me to leave Seattle early enough to catch my St Louis to Chicago to Shanghai chain of flights. I booked myself on a terrifying flight set actually – last flight to Denver followed by last flight to St Louis, landing after midnight with a 6am flight out of St Louis. If one flight failed, I missed my flight to Shanghai. Anyone who knows me in real life knows I have been massively angsting about this and was planning to actually play standby roulette to try and catch an earlier direct flight to St Louis.

Well, Friday that area of angst was over. A friendly lady from American called me and asked if I knew I had a physically impossible set of flights. I said yes, I explained I couldn’t afford the rebooking fee. I explained I had a flight on another carrier but was going to try and fly standby on American on a particular flight. She said “Flight ###?” and I said yes. 10 seconds later she had me confirmed on what is (this week only) the flight of my dreams. I will now get 8 hours at home between my two trips, get to swap suitcases (and laptops – I have my netbook with me in Seattle), and I am far less stressed about missing my Shanghai flight.

Thank you American for making my life
a little less stressful.

UPDATE: Today is my fated trips from hell. I’m so glad American rebooked me. I just got a call from the carrier – United/US Airways – on which I’d booked my overnight cheapo flight originally saying the flights were delayed and I was rebooked for tomorrow. I would have missed my flights to Shanghai.

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!

Starting tomorrow there will be wall to wall coverage of the AAS meeting on this site, Universe Today, Bad Astronomy and on a special Astronomy Cast Live page. On the Astronomy Cast Live page you’ll find YouTube videos, interviews, and coverage mirrored from all our feeds. Between us, hopefully no piece of news will go uncovered. We also may be able to get a couple special guest bloggers, but more on that later.

For now, I’m going to start making some phone calls and lining up plans with other people. Check back often as new content is certain to pop up several times a day.

(And that picture is the view out the hotel window – I’m switching hotels in a few hours to follow the cheap rates, but it was cool having a view of the famous Driskill hotel).

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…

Random 2: There is an interview of yours truly over at Books and Ideas with Ginger Campbell, MD. Give it a listen

Random 3: I was traumatized by tricker-treaters tonight. Over 200 kids in 3 hours. We went through 8 bags of candy, and reduced our selves to pulling out our personal candy stashes, and when we were bombarded with 15 kids at once and only had 5 pieces of candy left, they got snack bags of potato chips. We then turned off all our lights and hid. And this was night 1! Our town has TWO nights of tricker treating. I don’t get it. I don’t like it. Tomorrow, however, I’ll be on a plan (my poor poor husband, and 10 bags of candy, will try and battle the daemons, zombies, witches, and other customed kiddies).