I’ve seen so much, I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed and don’t quite know where to start. Emily Lakdawalla and Nancy Atkinson are also here, and maybe the best place to start is to send you to their stories (but come back when you’re done?)

Can NASA’s budget be saved (by Nancy Atkinson)
first ever geologic map of Io (by Nancy Atkinson
Notes from Titan Talks (by Emily Lakdawalla)
Ready for the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference? (by Emily Lakdawalla)

Cassini went into orbit around Saturn in 2004. It’s mission has been extended more than once, and today the mission team has orbital plans stretching out to 2017. This lengthy mission allows scientists to observe how Saturn and its moons are evolving from season to season. The equator of Saturn and its ring system is inclined 27 degrees relative to the Sun, and the orbit is 29.46 years. This inclination means that the two hemispheres of this system (above and below the rings essentially), receive markedly different heating during their summer and winter seasons. Today, Cassini has watched 8 years of seasonal variation, spanning from southern summer through equinox, and now into northern spring.

Each world in the Saturn system responds differently to these seasonal changes. Saturn itself stirs up mighty storms that appear as bright white spots that spread over time into bands that wrap themselves around this gas giant. While this is cool, it doesn’t hold a candle to some of the excitement that is happening on the moons of Saturn. Titan in particular puts on a fascinating seasonal show.

Titan has a thick methane atmosphere that extends for several hundred km above its surface (if I read the graphs correctly). This atmosphere has large scale circulation cells; hot air from the illuminated pole rises, circulates toward the winter pole, radiates its energy, and sinks to then circulate back toward the other pole. This circulation system breaks down, however, as the Sun crosses the moons’ equator. During the most recent, 2010-2011, Saturnian equinox, the circulation stalled. This abatement of the convective winds led to a segment of the atmosphere called the “detached haze” dropping radically in altitude. Shortly after the equinox, massive storms formed in Titan’s equatorial region.

In the wake of these storms, Cassini imaged large sections of Titan that appeared substantially darker, while other regions appeared substantially whiter/brighter. Over time, both the darker and brighter sections gradually returned to their normal colorations, but it was a patchy process. Here on Earth, Landsat and other earth viewing satellites have observed large swaths of land substantially darken after soaking rains, and then dry over time, with areas where the water pooled drying more slowly (for obvious reasons). It is believed this same soaking and drying process is what is being observed on Titan, although the rain is liquid methane rather than water.

It is more difficult to explain the regions on Titan that brightened. We do see this on Earth when snow falls or ice forms, but these substances normally melt, darkening the surface as they soak into the ground. On Titan, this darkening phase wasn’t seen. A possible solution is the formation of ices out of some substance that, like ice on Mars, goes from an ice state to a gas state without ever soaking the ground. Exactly what volitals may be forming this type of ice is unknown.

Beyond the atmospheric changes observed on Saturn and Titan, Cassini has also made a myriad of observations of ring evolution and and the detailed features of a plethera of Saturn’s icy moons. The big walk away message I got was Saturn’s rings are dynamic. There were the expected images, for instance seeing the gravitationally driven ripples that the little moon Dione raises in the rings it shepherds. There were the matches between science and theory that showed how spiral density waves drive spiral ripples through the ring disk. There were the stricking (pun intended) images of fresh white materials getting pulverized in the rings; this is evidence of small bodies getting gravitationally pulled into Saturn’s environment and gravitationally and collisionally destroyed. The rings are becoming understood, and it is awesome to watch the science come in.

From the rings to the moons, the little icy objects spread their data across a myriad of sessions. One of the moon features that came up over and over is the presence of parallel stripes (sometimes/often) seen running perpendicular to an extended crack. In one talk, Karl Mitchell showed a series of well developed linear features on Enceladus, evenly spaced, with thinner, less-defined structures forming beside the pattern with similar spacings. These tiger stripes, technically called ridge and trough formations, are now thought to perhaps be universal on tidally flexed objects where the stress and strain heats sub-surface fluids and drives convection.

The thing that really amazes me is the pace of understanding. The first geysers on Enceladus were spotted less than 10 years ago! Now we know ice geysers may be common, and we are starting to get models on what drives them. When Cassini got to Titan, we knew it had diverse terrain. Now we know Titan has dunes and scarp and lakes and storms that reshape its surface. Cassini has brought the data needed to bring the science a long long way.

I can’t wait to see what the next few years of the mission will discover.

Austerity by 401 on Flickr

Fine print: While I receive funding from NASA for some of my work, this blog post written by me as a private citizen.

Today was the NASA Town Hall; that 1 or more hour window of time when some official from NASA stands at the podium and tells us how NASA will grow or crush our dreams. The very first NASA town hall meeting I attended was in 2003, at an LPSC meeting very much like the one I’m attending now, but that was a different economic time. It was actually the same week that we started bombing Iraq after 9/11. At that NASA Town Hall a woman whom I don’t remember stood up and outlined how over the next 10 years everything the planetary sciences field asked for in their Decadal Survey planning document was going to be built and flown. It was glorious. For every science goal, there was a planned mission.

That was 2003.

It is now 2012.

Tonight, Steven Mackwell, director of the Lunar & Planetary Institute, opened NASA night by saying it was going to be a “Colorful” evening. He then turned the microphone over to John Grunsfeld, former NASA chief scientist, former Hubble repairing astronaut, former deputy director at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and current Assoc. Administer of NASA in charge of the Science Mission Director.

Grunsfeld is kind of a superhero for most of us. He was a scientist. He fixed the Hubble. And then he did some more science. Now he’s fighting the good fight to try and make sure all of us can do even more science.

Tonight he had the distasteful job of going over the budget with us. “Here’s the NASA budget. None of these numbers are new,” he said. And then he made it clear he doesn’t like it either, “The budget got whacked… Am I allowed to say whacked?” At the end of the day, the problems came down to a lack of paying it forward. Normally, when one mission goes from planning and construction (expensive) to operations (cheap, comparatively) its budget is reinvested into a new mission, paying the science forward and letting new ideas and new missions get a start. This year, when Mars Science Lab launched, and with Ladee nearing launch, we should have seen their budgets reinvested. But we didn’t.

Last year, at LPSC, the decadal survey was released, and things looked bad, but this year, the actual budget is significantly below our worst-case scenario. Planetary Science , this community in particular, saw a 20% budget cut. As was pointed out during the Q&A by Karl Mitchell (JPL), those 20% represent jobs, and there are already people pre-emptively leaving the field ahead of projected layoffs. What a lot of people don’t realize is these cuts will most deeply impact the youth in our field. Many senior people who normally can find funding for themselves and a small fleet of postdocs and students will now just be funding themselves. It’s hard. It’s ugly. Especially when we work so hard to get people to get educations in this field.

Grunsfeld tried to explain where this mess came from. NASA as a whole is pretty much in a flat budget situation. The running joke, as Grunsfeld pointed out, is “Flat is the new up.” You hear it everywhere. But, as Grunsfeld continued (paraphrase) “That is belittling.”

But in this economy, it may also “somewhat mean that we are valued.”

In other words, it could have been a whole lot worse.

NASA has been here before. In that lull between Apollo and the Space Shuttle, between the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Mission and the 1981 first shuttle launch, we saw ourselves faced with no way to get a man into space. Budgets were tight, the gas crisis had people waiting for hours for gas, and Silicon Valley was just starting its first big boom.

Today, we can get people to space, at the cost of $63 million or so aboard Russian rockets. It’s a solution. Today, we don’t know when we’ll next fly our own NASA rocket, but SpaceX will probably be launching people in a couple years. Budgets are tight, but while gas is stupid-expensive, there aren’t lines. And, well, Silicon Valley is starting to boom again.

We’ve been here before. We just need to brace ourselves for the turbulence.

The president’s budget drops NASA’s entire budget to less then 0.5% of the US budget. This is the lowest percentage we’ve had in decades, and the lowest dollar total we’ve had in a while.

In order to survive, we need to prioritize. Well, not we. I wasn’t there. Actually, poor John Grunsfeld, the messenger we shouldn’t kill, wasn’t there either. He was hired after the budgets were set.

So here is how we got here. And I’m going to use provocative language on purpose here, borrowing from the Republican contraception debate.

NASA doesn’t want to abort or kill its young. This means, missions that are already in gestation – funded, in the process of being built, scientists and engineers actively employed in taking care of all the details – get first priority.

In the planetary sciences, we have two missions essentially in their third trimester: getting MAVEN and LADEE finished and launched is the highest priority. As Grunsfeld put it, “The most dangerous place for a spacecraft is on the Earth.” From problems due to gravity, dust, accidents, let’s repeat gravity, and, well, congress, lots of things can keep the mission from ever flying. It is better to launch something on a sub-optimal date (parking orbits exist), then to not launch. We need these missions launched. So… start the budget by funding them.

The next priority is the just conceived missions – Osiris-REX and the still being finalized next discovery mission (think of this as “the eggs are all fertilized, and now NASA is picking one for implantation”). These are missions were new hires are still being determined, and physical, flight ready equipment doesn’t exist, but there are fully fleshed out plans to get from here to science. The nursery has been painted, and it’s just waiting to be filled with the sounds of screaming rockets, and graduate students crying to be fed their data.

(ok, this is a lame analogy, but I’m trying to make a point)

Beyond this, priorities are making sure there is food on hand for future generations of missions, and food for spacecraft means developing the Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Stirling_Radioisotope_Generator).

Then there is the matter of taking care of the children we have; there are a variety of missions still in their primary phase, flying strong and still working to solve their primary questions. Killing them would be like taking a gun to a toddler. You don’t even know what it’s capable of yet – it could discover anything. We need to let these missions see through their science missions.

And then we have the older missions that are still doing good work and requested time to go into extended phases. The committees that decide if we can fund these are essentially death panels that are enjoined to determine who is still employed 6-months from now to work on missions that are working and doing novel science. Think of all the things we wouldn’t know if back in 2004 the Mars Rovers hadn’t gotten an extension? (I’m sweating through one mission’s senior review, waiting to see if it gets carried forward).

Oddly, beneath all these plans is the need to maintain our international commitments to provide promised parts to other nation’s spacecraft. This feels a bit like deprioritizing our child support payments. We agreed with Italy to birth the Bepi-Columbo mission, and we need to hold up our side of that agreement, and provide the instruments and support we promised. We already betrayed our relationship with ESA by backing out of future Mars plans, now we need to see it through with Italy. The same is true with ESA on Rosetta, and Mars Express. We need to keep our commitments and try and re-earn the trust and re-build the relationships we have damaged. We spurned our co-parents, forcing hard choices on them that made the missions suffer. We need to try and repair these relationships.

Beyond this, we need to have a healthy Research and Technology development budget (think college fund), and we also need to start trying to repair the hole left in our hearts when congress aborted the Mars program. We need to move on, and start planning for our next try; planning our next attempt to have a Mars mission.

And when we’re done taking care of our existing children – taking care of our existing commitments – and when we’re done trying to secure our future energy and technological needs… when we’re done, there is simply nothing left. Not until someone figures out how to bring in more money.

You shouldn’t have another child if taking care of it would force you to murder an existing child, and with the NASA budget, finding funding for a new and novel missions would mean killing off missions in extended or primary operations.

This means, the normal calls for proposals for new programs and new missions are on hold. Calls for Discovery missions are moved to 2015, adding a 54-month gap to their normal every 24 month cycle. Calls for New Frontiers missions are getting pushed to 2016. The program I largely rely on, ROSES EPOESS grants, are skipping this year, and hopefully coming back out in 2013.

It’s grim.

And yet….

And yet Obama still plans to have a person on an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars by 2030.

And this is where the new paradigm comes into play. If NASA is going to send people to planetary bodies, the planetary science needs to be done to understand those bodies.

Modern planetary science is 50 years old. In 1962, Mariner 2 went to Venus and sent back our first in situ data from another world. Gone were the days of using telescopes on earth to stare at reflected starlight. We were there.

Today there are spacecraft orbiting Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Earth, the Moon, Mars, and Saturn. New Horizons is on its way to Pluto and Juno is on its way to Jupiter. To use net speak, we’ve used spacecraft to pwn the solar system. All you data belong to us. We have done all of this in 50 years.

Right now, the future looks really bleak. Budgets hurt. A lot. People are getting fired. We don’t know what the next new mission will be. We don’t know when the next mission will be. But with Grunsfeld and his colleague (and I’m guessing cohort) Jim Green, we know why things are the way they are, and we know we’ll be heard as we try and figure out how to keep doing great science with what we have.

One of the ideas that is floating around is the “We need to double NASA’s budget” argument. Neil deGrasse Tyson uses it. Someone used it today. My God that would be amazing if it happened, but it isn’t going to happen if we say we can only do amazing things if you double NASA’s budget. If someone comes to me and says, “I know you only pay $20/hr, and I’ll do a crap job constantly complaining if you give me $20/hr, BUT if you give me $40/hr then I might not complain, and I’ll do all these amazing things…” Well, that’s someone I’m not going to hire. The person I’m going to hire and fight for and find spare dollars and cool opportunities for is the person who comes to me and says, “I’ll take the job. I just want to do cool and amazing things. I can’t work every miracle, but I’ll work hard on what you pay me, and find ways to leverage others to build even better things then you can imagine.” That person, that is the person I fight for and increase the funding for. And NASA, in this moment, in these times of crisis, needs to demonstrate it can do amazing things today, and that it doesn’t need to wait for some flush future that I don’t see coming. If a lean NASA can inspire and innovate Congress will be able to believe that a fat NASA can build a fat portfolio of projects.

We’re in a trust re-earning stage. We’re in a post-shuttle stage. We’re in a stage of some amount of confusion. NASA needs to prove it still has its shit together – and it will.

But we’ve been here before, and we’ll make it as a field.

One key point I want to end on is the need to use what is happening today as a civics lesson. In our Astro 101 classes and in our Geo 101 classes we need to teach people how science and politics play together. People need to want NASA, and they need to be civically engaged, and they need to bring their want and their engagement together to let politicians know they want NASA to succeed.

NASA’s budget is in the grand scheme of things is nothing. McDonalds could easily fund a mission off their marketing budget. No big deal. According to Forbes, there are 38 individuals with personal wealth greater than NASA‘s entire budget. Oh, and the stimulus bill last year, according to Tyson, was more than NASA’s cumulative budget across history. NASA doesn’t get a lot of money. It’s not a lot – but with that not a lot bordering on nothing, NASA has pwnd the solar system with spacecraft.

We’re creative. We’re smart. As a field we will survive this mess. But not all of us. And I already mourn the students, post docs, and young people who may not survive. … And I recognize I’m one of the early career people, and I just hope I survive.

But on the worst of days, we need to remember, NASA pwnd the solar system. All the data belongs to us (and it’s in the Planetary Data System).

Hourglass by borabora on Flickr

Science moves slowly.

That may seem like an odd statement when the pace of press releases and breaking news seems to imply that new discoveries are flying fast and furious, with labs making discoveries and publishing them almost before they’re ready for prime time. What is missing from this perspective are the realities of the funding cycle and publishing cycle.

I just had to fill out a form that required me to list all my recent publications, and I realized that every publication I had submitted, first author or not, in 2011 has to be resubmitted to another journal because either no rational referee could be found (one paper included in the referee report “But I’m a biologist, not a social scientist, so maybe I just don’t get this.” ) or because after the review was complete they determined the paper best fit in another publication. This means, an entire year’s worth or research is delayed in seeing the light of day. In one case, the paper was originally submitted in May, and I only got the rejection letter a couple weeks ago. This is a bit horrifying.

Science moves slowly, and the major reason relates to the checks and balances that are meant to make this a meritocracy.

Here are the time scales we’re dealing with. Let’s say you get an awesome idea January for something you want to do. If the idea is an astronomy research idea, the grant deadline is November, so hurry up and wait. If the idea is education or computation related, you might get lucky and have a May or March deadline. It takes a solid 2 weeks fulltime (unpaid) effort for someone like me (e.g. with experience) to write a kickass proposal with a solid chance of being funded, and 4 days to whip together something with a wing and a prayer. Did I mention this is unpaid effort? So this is something that gets done instead of sleeping, spending time with spouses, or otherwise living. (Admittedly, lots of people ignore the fact that they aren’t supposed to write grants while getting paid off grants, but… I’m in Illinois and don’t want to join the governor in jail). The idea here is to get all the people with similar ideas to pitch their ideas at the same time so the limited funds can be fairly distributed to the best ideas. It’s a good idea, if a delaying one.

Once a grant is submitted, it typically takes 6 – 12 months to find out if you won the grant (this is a competitive processes), and another several months to get the money in hand.

So, for that idea you had in January and submitted a proposal for in November, you might get the funding in August of the following year. That’s 20 months from idea to funding.

Assuming what you’re doing produces results at an zippy pace, you might be able to submit your first paper 10 months later. You are now at 30 months – 2.5 years – from idea to submitting a result to peer review.

It is supposed to take 6-10 weeks to get a paper back from a journal. Often a set of changes are requested, and this is another 4 weeks or so of effort, you then resubmit, and maybe a month later have a publication date. This is assuming all goes well. My personal experiences is this process is more like 6 months than 4.5months.

So, maybe 3 years after the idea, you have something to show for it.

This is if you are lucky.

If your idea requires building an instrument, it might be 2 or 3 years before you start collecting data, and you’re first paper gets submitted 3 years after you are funded. If you (like me) have journal hell, it might be 2 years from writing the paper to seeing it published. If you have grant hell (which one team saw during IYA), you might only get your grant’s funding 2 years after you submitted the grant! This means it might be 3 years from idea to funding, 3 years of research, and 2 years to publication – a total of 7 years from idea to published result.

The two largest delays in going from idea to publication are both related to the peer review process.

Most grants require three steps (greatly simplified): 1) the agency makes sure the grant conforms to requirements, 2) a panel of peers is brought together to review and rank the grants, and 3) the agency figures out which grants it has enough funding to award based on that ranked list, and sends out the money. The review process is about 4 weeks by itself – As panelists, we need time to read, think, discuss, and write up our reviews. Agencies are always alert to the changing tides of congress, and sometimes (often?) funding is held up as agencies hope for a little extra money. (And sometimes, only after peer-review, do they realize the grant didn’t conform to requirements, and it gets rejected on a technicality).

With journals, it’s almost the same set of steps. 1) The journal makes sure the paper is appropriate to the journal, 2) A lone reviewer reads and critiques the paper, and 3) the journal figures out when it can fit the paper into the publication or rejects it. (And sometimes, only after peer-review, they realize it doesn’t fit their journal.)

In a perfect world, the slowness of this process is forgiven by the idealized way that peer-review should lead to constant improvement of our work. Comments on grants should lead grant writers to be able to improve their projects, and always do better (like a good teacher’s comments on an essay). Comments on papers should help researchers better distill their ideas, and should ask critical questions that help make sure the science is valid. The reality is every researcher has that stack of comments that makes no sense. (My most insane: I got a grant back with comments that included being hyper-critical of us for not having our podcast in iTunes, but our grant included a screenshot of our podcast not only in iTunes, but ranked in the top 10 and listed under new and notable). As near as I can tell, 20-40% of peer-reviewed comments in some arenas are useless – they are either arbitrarily harsh and hyper-critical of sometimes imagined details, or they are meaninglessly trivial/missing the point. Having sat on the review side of things, I know that sometimes the desire to not be too harsh of the politically powerful (because we want to keep our jobs) gets in the way of honest reviews that hit on real issues. I know that sometimes the “this researcher knows better” notion, coupled with exhaustion, leads to harsher wording on paper reviews then is necessary.  But if this was all that was happening, we wouldn’t constantly debate axing the peer-review system. The reality is, papers sometimes don’t get published because the reviewer you had has an agenda your research isn’t part of. The reality is, good researchers get black listed because they are nasty (or politically incompetent) humans. The reality is, people are just tired and are sometimes having a bad day and take it out on the paper they are asked to review.

While the peer-review system often works, it also often (probably not just as often, but still often) doesn’t work. I’m starting to struggle with this question: How do we justify the long delays in the progress of science that are introduced by relying on peer review, when peer review introduces chaos into the system? How do we justify all the delays when so many published papers are crap, and so many good papers linger in publication purgatory and get bounced between journals for a year or even years at a time?

I don’t know what the answer is. I’m making the decision to only publish in free-access and embargo free journals, but even they have peer-review. Since I am not a tenured professor I can’t simply share my research by posting it online – universities require peer-reviewed papers for promotion and tenure. The only solution I know is for the entire community to decide the system is broken and make a break away from peer-review at the same time. But is this throwing out the baby with the bath water?

I don’t know the answer, but I’m frustrated that the speed of technological progress causes papers and ideas to become stale before they can make it through peer-review.

There has got to be a better way. I just don’t know what it is, and how to make it the reality.

(One oft suggested substitute system is we all submit to websites that allow a thumb up, thumb down ranking and comments, and people earn authority points through good papers and good reviews. Over time, the top research would rise and the bad research would sink. This is a huge change though, and there is little incentive to change the system so radically, but… This is the best idea I’ve heard so far. Unfortunately, to work, it requires everyone to participate, and that just isn’t going to happen without institutional carrots to motivate faculty and researchers).

Blue Origin Rocket

Currently I’m attending the Next Generation Sub-Orbital Research (and Education) Conference in Palo Alto, California. I’m staring at all my notes struggling with finding a coherent theme, idea, or even emotion that I can use to tie together my thoughts. I find that I just can’t; this is a conference that simply defies being captured in a straight forward manner.

My struggle to find a coherent message comes from half of my brain bouncing up and down shouting “this is so awesome” as it basks in all the goodness that is commercial space, while the other half of my brain says “But this is only for the 1% – and that’s not me…”

I’m going to try and explain this mental dichotomy, but I want to say upfront, I’m not an economist or a capitalist (I work at non-profits, doing open source / creative commons projects, just hoping donations and grants go to those who do good things.) I’m bound to offend some of you and say some things that are naive, and I apologize up front. That is not my intension. I’m simply trying to explain the mixed enthusiasm and sadness with which I meet the conferences content.

Modern commercial space exploration is the domain of a post-Apollo generation. Some of these new space agency leaders remember Apollo, but many, like Elon Musk, are Generation X, and while they may have been in diapers while the last men walked on the Moon, watching these missions on TV wasn’t to them what it was to our parents who were in-college or starting a career.

I am part of the same generation as these leaders, and I’m going to make some assumptions here, and say that if they’re like me, they grew up dreaming of rocket cars, but realized at some point in the mid-1980s that NASA wasn’t going to provide them… ever. Our source of inspiration, our beloved NASA, was starting a slow stagnation that advanced at the pace of the expansion of democracy. As Perestroika took hold, the need to race to space was lost. NASA is funded by congress. Congress is politically motivated, not scientifically motivated. Congress doesn’t fund people to climb a mountain because it’s there; they fund people to climb a mountain to put a listening post on top of it. As my generation realized NASA wasn’t going to make all our dreams come true, some of us (like me) abandoned our goals to be an astronaut and simply became scientists and engineers. Others – the leaders at this conference – said screw it, if NASA won’t do it, I will.

Let me be clear: We were inspired by NASA. Many of us still want to work with NASA, and I think everyone at this conference wants to see NASA’s science budget grow and continue to explore and produce scientific success stories like the Mars Rovers, Cassini, and Hubble. There are just some things NASA isn’t designed to do.

Our nostalgia for the (often before we were born) glory day’s of NASA was reflected in the standing ovation that Astronaut Neil Armstrong received when he took the podium yesterday to discuss his 1950′s sub-orbital explorations in the X-15. Listening to him talk about flying something that I can only describe as a horizontal rocket with wings glued to the side, all I could think was: they were brilliant, insane, took risks I can’t image people taking today, and because of this combo of mad risk-taking genius, they got us to space when computers were less powerful then today’s dumb cell phones.

As Alan Stern put it, “If we are able to see our dreams [of commercial space exploration] envisioned, it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants.”

And Neil Armstrong acknowledged the impatience and frustration many of us sometimes feel – we want to see the 1950s and 1960s rate of innovation today! He acknowledged our impatience and frustration when he relayed that Scaled Composite’s Burt Rutan regularly mocks NASA because he developed WhiteKnightOne and SpaceShipOne (and Two) much faster and much cheaper than NASA could have.

And then Armstrong, as did June Scobee (widow of Challenger astronaut, Dick Scobee), talked about risk. Going to space takes risk. To advance new geographic frontiers you really do need to be prepared to die…. or at least to blow up spacecraft. That said, modern culture is risk adverse and even when you do something kind of expecting to blow up a rocket or two, the media treats you like you did something really bad when your spacecraft fails and dies.

This was articulated by Bretton Alexander of Blue Origin. They recently lost one of their prototypes – these are the decidedly cute rockets that have both a vertical launch and vertical landing (link). They new as they were testing that eventually, as they pushed their systems, they’d find its limits and it would break. This was planned. But then, when they finally had a spacecraft die an expected death, the media jumped all over them, and the press was all bad.

And here is were we start to see the divide.

When Blue Origin loses a spacecraft and gets bad press, they make sure their staff and financial backers know this really wasn’t a big deal. They bitch about the bad media, and they move on, continuing to innovate awesome rockets that look like something out of a comic book.

If NASA loses a rocket they are innovating, there is a good chance congress will convene an inquiry; funds and programs will be frozen, and new system constraints will be added that increase costs in the name of preventing future spacecraft from blowing up.

This difference in consequences means that Blue Origin can essentially innovate through experimentation – they are allowed, with their private capital and grants funds/contracts, to try things, take risks, and have failures. If you are a tinkerer or a programmer, you know that the fastest way to success is often to build something part way, try it out, see where it breaks, fix it, and then build the next part and try it until it breaks. NASA on the other hand has to complete something and spend all the time needed to make sure it never breaks. This means they have to make sure there are no issues through inspection rather than trial and error. If you write software, you know it is far harder to debug by reading your code rather then by adding alert messages and die() statements. At the end of the day, NASA can’t fail – no alert or die() statements allowed – and have to do everything the hard way.

Throughout all of yesterday, it became more and more clear that a lot of commercial space flight is being driven by millionaires and billionaires who decided they will step in and innovate where NASA can’t, and in ways that NASA can’t. NASA in turn has recognized the potential of the companies and have embraced them as being the future. While, as Bretton Greason pointed out, the media often refers to commercial space, and space tourists in particular, as rich playboys jet setting purposelessly to space, the reality is, these are people who are spending their “money and time paving the way forward for the future of [space exploration] for humanity.”

Yes, commercial space is the playground of the millionaires and billionaires, but the thing is, they are using resources to research and develop what it takes to make space an industry, and it is going to take thousands of test flights to work out all the issues needed to work out what is needed for space to be economically viable. At a certain level, commercial forums can’t be limited by the time scales of NASA research. As Greason pointed out, companies can’t wait 6 years for a single launch that might suddenly get cancelled by an out-of-funding NASA. As an academic, I don’t understand the phrase instant gratification. Working with NASA, it’s all about the delays.

Let me say this again: Commercial space is doing good things.

But when space becomes something done by millionaires and billionaires, you end up with some really strange social/customer mis-conceptions built into the system.

One of the biggest problems all these companies are trying to figure out is who will purchase the seats and cargo space on their launch vehicles. Each of these companies have dreams of building pretty amazing capacity – we’re looking at potentially a couple launches a day – and they see their seats and cargo bays as places for tourists, for researchers, and for educators. One person mentioned that as part of her audience research, she is surveying people who typically have a leisure budget equivalent to the cost of a vacation to space.

Let’s look at those numbers (taken from US census unless otherwise stated). According to the Virgin Galactic website, deposits (per person) start at $20,000 and tickets cost $200,000. This means that for a couple to fly together, you’re looking at a >$40,000 deposit, a $400,000 flight price, plus costs associated with training, traveling, and housing. For comparison, an average teacher in Utah earn’s $40,000 a year (US median household income is $51,914). This means that the deposit price for some couples will be the same as the US median income (or more). The cost of the flight, well, it’s more than the $188,400 median US home value. To add further context, to be in the top 1% in the US, you need a household income of $506,000 (Wall Street Journal). Since people spend (depending on source) 6-8% of their income on leisure, this space journey is actually beyond the reach of most of the 1%.

Many of the school teachers I work with can’t afford paper. 92% of teachers (from talk by Sanlyn Buxner) use their personal money to get materials for their classes.

Within this context, imagine my reaction when I heard commercial space company after commercial space agency talk about educators and educational programs as potential customers, and how they want to see teachers flying to sub-orbit with student experiments. They weren’t discussing donating the resources, they were talking about a paying customer base.

From the people that I talked with, this was simply a lack of comprehension about the limits many of us work within. These are mostly really awesome, well-meaning people who just don’t understand small budgets. To give you an example, one high-energy younger fellow came up to me after my talk asking if I’d talk at a conference this summer. I gave him my standard answer, “I’m sorry, but I can only go if you have funding.” He actually made me embarrassed as he badgered me about how it didn’t cost that much (conferences cost ~$1200-1600 normally), and in exasperation he asked “But how are you here?” (This is a conference with no funding.) The truth is, I’m staying at a friend’s condo, paying some of this trip out of pocket, paying some of it out of scraps of funding left over from last year, and the generosity of strangers has really gone a long way. My total receipts will add up to about $400, and I could beg, borrow, find that amount. Funding is tight, and as I tried to explain to this confused person, I struggle each month to pay my staff. Graduate student’s cost $1000/month, and students cost about $800/month. This means that every trip I go on that someone else doesn’t pay for costs me the equivalent of 1-2 months of student salary. I like my students more than I like travel, and I’m not in a position to add unbudgeted conferences to my “things to do” list just because someone thinks I’d be a good speaker.

If someone thinks it is reasonable to ask me to spend ~$1400 to do them – a stranger – a favor by speaking at their conference, they clearly don’t understand normal person budgets.

Space is going to become a rich person hobby.

Just like around the world ballooning, trips to climb Everest, and on-foot explorations of the South Pole, wealthy individuals with time and resources to spare are going to begin to train and travel as journeymen astronauts on missions above the majority of the Earth’s atmosphere. As costs drop and abilities expand, they are going to utilize spacecraft that travel point to point, carrying them from the US to Australia in under an hour. Eventually, it will become like the Concorde – something for elite business travelers, the press, and people with money to spare – and sometimes it will be something the little guy saves up for across a lifetime.

Yes, there is the chance for research and education, but the research will be from big commercial firms, and the education – they need a different model or it is only going to be education available at elite institutions.

This isn’t our everyone-has-a-rocket-car future.

With NASA, with tax dollars, educational programs are free or the cost of equipment. Space travel is only for astronauts, but that is at least a competitive, “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and everyone likes you,” process.

I think becoming a pilot for the commercial space agencies will be the same meritocracy as with NASA, but their scientists (payload specialists and mission specialists) will be “who has the money?” and the message I’m hearing is their teachers too will be “who has the money?”

And it hurts to hear the divide between the haves and have nots widening.

But, the wealthy are the ones building commercial space. They are using their money to do what NASA can’t. They are building, innovating, blowing things up, and successfully visiting a place above the clouds where you can see daytime stars. A corollary to the American dream is that while hard work and drive should allow anyone to rise above their surroundings to succeed (but note), if you don’t (as I didn’t) actually try to become wealthy you really can’t whine if you don’t have access to the play toys of the rich.

But, as I sit here not whining, I would say NASA has done one thing really right that the commercial space community needs to learn from: NASA spends a meaningful (albeit decreasing) amount of its budget on education and outreach. Dear commercial companies – Dear XCOR, Blue Origin, Armadillo Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, and Dear Masten – As you build the rocket car future for the 1% and for high dollar research programs, can you please consider endowing non-profits who can use a few percent of your budget to make space accessible to the classroom through disturbed systems that share data while creating a shared space-age future?

(For context, my entire program – all my staff, travel and servers for Astronomy Cast, CosmoQuest, and everything else – costs less then sending a couple into space.)

The dream is alive. Commercial space is coming. I’m glad this conference is giving me a front row seat. I just wish the cost of getting out of the front row and getting onto the frontier of space was hard work instead of hard currency.

Yea for Firetrucks

Earlier today I wrote on Google+ that there are day’s when you run head first into the tail-end of the probability distribution. Today was one of those days, and now that it’s over and I’m laying in bed typing, I can happily say I got to see both sides of the Gaussian.

It started as a normal travel day for me. I got up far too early, shoveled myself in and out of the shower and into the car, following the inner mantra, “You were upgraded, it’s ok. They will feed you, then you can sleep.” From waking at 6:30am to being at the airport at 8am to being in the air by 9:30am, all was good. I was looking forward to a meet up with Bay Area astronomy folks, and needed to spend a bit more time on my talk. I had plenty of time for all of that once I made it to San Jose. And if delays happened, that was fine. From St Louis there were many options to get to San Jose via Dallas or Chicago, and once in LA, the same was again true. The calculated risk I’d taken in planning tonight’s meet up was that the sum of my delays wouldn’t surpass 5 hours, and anything that happened would happen in St Louis or Los Angeles, where options were many.

As was pointed out by @sjorge, I fly so much that my time was eventually going to run out, and the improbable was due to happen. Today I think I rolled a Yatzee.

Per plan, I boarded the flight, promptly fell asleep while folks were still boarding, and dozed until a friendly stewardess offered me a drink.

This would coincidently be the same point in the flight when the cabin began to fill with fumes.

Several passages asked “what’s that smell” (everyone upgraded was fearing for their breakfast, never thinking further than food). Then the main cabin stewardess asked the first class stewardess “what’s that smell”. Then we had all the flight staff except the co pilot smelling air vents. The captain kept the cock piut door open as we banked sharply for Kansas City and landed what I believe my ground school instructor would have called “a bit hot.” There was honest fear we might be on fire, and the runway was lined with fire trucks and ambulances as we prepared to taxi somewhere far from the terminal. Luckily, no immediate smoke seemed to be coming from the plane, so they took us to the terminal and let us get off on the gangway.

American handled it as well as could be expected. Those who they could rebook, they rebooked. Those who they couldn’t, they fed and they provided access to the Admirals Club. They had to bring us a plane from Dallas, and it took time. I was one of the ones they couldn’t rebook. They checked Delta, US Air, Frontier – all the options accessible to their computer – and nothing would get me from there to here. So I planned a plan c: Rent a car and drive. (Since I’m giving a talk on Monday – I didn’t want to risk a second day)

As several people pointed out, there were tickets available on Southwest. The thing is, AA can’t transfer me onto a Southwest airplane, and flying SW would mean buying a ticket. As a state university professor I often find myself juggling the “What can I pay out of pocket? What can my funding pay for? and What will my funding pay for that the university will actually agree to?” This last one may sound odd, but I know from experience that while it may sometimes cost less to buy frequent flier miles to pay for a ticket to someplace like Bend, Oregon, the accounting department doesn’t care if it costs less, because they just don’t have a way of coping with that pattern of spending. I also know that flying to Chicago from LA and then taking the train home is not something they can handle either. Weird things just don’t get rationally reimbursed. This means when I get stuck, I have to ask, how can I fix this and not break the system. Here it was easy. My funding can’t afford buying a second ticket, the university wouldn’t let me buy a second ticket, and my personal funding really can’t afford the second ticket. The rental car from LAX to SJC was only going to cost $5 more then the rental car I was already getting, and the gas I could suck up and buy on my own. QED. Rental car it was.

But sometimes humans act as fairy god parents.

Just as the gate staff in Kansas City were starting the “The flight is on it’s way, we’re hoping for an X o’clock departure” dance, kindness began to spring up in my twitter and G+ streams. There were offers of directions, of lunch in Kansas City (waves at Sarah King), of a place to stay in LA (waves @SurlyAmy), and an enigmatic “Call me at” from someone I’d tweeted with a couple times, but didn’t know the way I’ve come to know many of you over the years and the social media messages. (And anyone who knows me, knows my response to “Call me” is always to Skype someone). So I direct tweeted that person to Skype me, but by the time he had a chance we were getting ready to board a plane with a promise of GoGo Inflight internet.

It was already a long day. We had landed a bit after 10am in Kansas City, and at 3:30pm when we finally took off again, I was ready to just drink hot tea and contemplate mountains below. I was sad I had to cancel our meet up, but everyone was so gracious; I have to say thank you to my hosts in Mountain View – Matthew, Edna, and Michael – who together took care of all the details for me.

Boarding that flight, I found my self back in the same seat on a new plane – one without food – and finally on my way. As we crossed 10,000ft I turned on my laptop and found internets were down. It was fine. I had 3 hours of battery, and 3 hours of work I could do offline. But I missed that Skype invite from that mystery “Call me” tweeter.

Landing in LA, I started walking towards car rental while I worked on retrieving my tweets and mail. One hand worked the phone while the other steered the luggage, and I walked dangerously based on peripheral vision and a fairly robust knowledge of the American terminal at LAX. There was that person again in my twitter stream – checking on me, and offering info that tickets were available on Southwest, and he could help.

I have to admit, on landing in LA I was a digital mess. My laptop was dead, my phone was dying, my iPad was discombobulated by the Edge network. Trying to respond became a matter of sitting on the floor next to an outlet, realizing the internet God was not with me, and deciding to call that mystery number. @Fujiyakumo – another astronomy loving tech head – was offering me a golden ticket to San Jose. A stranger had solved a problem that to me was about to be 6 hours of pain, with a few clicks of a mouse that were clips I couldn’t have made.

After a precautionary mad dash from LAX’s terminal 4 to terminal 1 (where cutting the diagonal isn’t allowed), I found myself at a gate with enough time to get a coffee, a donut, and a jolt of electricity that would carry me the rest of the way to my temporary home at a friend’s. Without @Fujiyakumo’s help, I’d probably still be driving – probably just be getting to the outer edges of the Bay Area mega sprawl. I wouldn’t have my talk ready for tomorrow, and I wouldn’t be curled up in bed having taken photos of the Moon and Jupiter.

Everyday I read stories about scams, and how people bully and take advantage, and how generally online is an ugly place where you need to be able to recognize when you need to click away from a conversation to keep yourself safe.

Today wasn’t everyday. Today I learned the internet is full of good people who want to reach out and help, and who make the world better by paying it forward.

Today was a weird day. It was a memorable day. But the only parts of today I’d really change are getting up at 6:30am and canceling the meet up. Thanks to the emergency landing I now know more about trust and goodness then I knew before, and for this, I cannot thank all of you enough. At the end of the day, today was a good day.

I’m not the only one who experiences this. I sometimes think the only people who look like “astronomers” are white, 50-something men who make poor wardrobe choices. The problem with this stereotype is that’s just not astronomy. We are young. We are old. We are men and we are women. We are all ethnicities and orientations and we have all different belief and non-belief systems.

I wish people could see the diversity of who is in astronomy, planetary science, and space exploration. I want to see the stereotype change, at least a little bit.

With the CosmoQuest community, last night we launched a new project called “We are CosmoQuest” that I’m hoping help make showcase the people in astronomy. It is an essay project that is collecting personal statements about why different people – people like you – are passionate about astronomy, planetary science, and/or space exploration. We are trying to show through the voices of the people in the field how all of us individually ended up engaged in these fields that we love either professionally or through amateur/citizen science/EPO/open source programs.

This project is just starting, and I hope you’ll consider becoming part of CosmoQuest, and sharing with us your story and your passion for space.

Inbox Trust (TM) is one of those things you have to be really careful with. The reason people are able to spread malware and bilk too many people out of money is the same reason people sometimes take the wrong person home at the end of a date. The person crying over the “perfect guy” who disappeared after leaving a false phone number  is the same sort of person who cries over the Nigerian prince who abused the bank account numbers they shared – Both sets of people misplaced their trust because they wanted something to good to be true to fast.

You need to know whose links you can trust, which attachments can be safely opened, and to whom you can share minor confidences without fear of forward.

What always gets me is the people who try and force inbox trust, and how often people fall prey to this. In some ways it is like any forced vulnerability. We’ve all been there in real life – there is that late night conversation with an acquaintance (or even a newly met person) that somehow leds to over sharing at 4am. They say “Can I trust you?” and we all want to be trusted, so too often everyone ends up saying too much, and through this shared vulnerability friendship is created. There is a difference between a face to face moment of TMI, and someone in your inbox asking for confidentiality. As the saying goes, on the internet, anyone can authenticate their dog. You just don’t know who or what is really behind that message you’re getting. At least when that middle of the night TMI turns out to have occurred with a crazy person, you know who that person is and how to get them back out of your life as needed. With your inbox, that crazy person can just come back with a new and improved user name.

I often get emails like the one I screen captured above. They start with the “Can I trust you?” theme. They then ask me to do something that will endanger myself to prove I’m trust worthy; open an attachment, send bank numbers, etc etc. It is psychologically clever. I bet lots of people fall prey to these attempts to scam / infect / harm them and their privacy/identity. Just by saying, “Can I trust you?” they are priming people to do things that prove they are deserving of trust.

The other type of email I get a lot also starts with “Can I trust you?” but it is a type that makes me sad because they come from mislead individuals who don’t realize how dumb they are being. These are people who say “Can I trust you? Will you please keep the following in complete confidence?” and they go on to describe some science theory they have or some other issue they have that they want my assistance with. These people are assuming, based on the person I appear to be online, that they can trust me, and they reach out to me without introduction. Now the thing is, the person I play online is actually pretty true to who I am, so people who reach out to me and make themselves vulnerable are safe, but it makes me worry. Not everyone out there is the person they play online. If someone struggling with something reaches out to the wrong blogger, they could get mocked by name online.

As we all become more an more virtual, we need to change how we interact. Yes, we all still want to be trusted, but we need to all also be much more careful in the venues in which we give our trust, and in which we give trust to others. If you say something online, always ask yourself, “Am I prepared for what I said to be blogged?” Ask yourself, “Am I ready for my email conversation to get forwarded to friends, family, employers?” Ask yourself, are you ready to be digitally stripped naked?

Trust is a hard thing, and as we become more and more digital, the levels of trust we must have are getting greater and greater. Protect your selves, and be aware of the psychology of the simple phrase “Can I trust you?” And remember the other old adage, if they have to ask, then answer is probably no.

Orion Constellation by davedehetre

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

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

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

Back?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the past several years, my cohost and friend Fraser Cain has been talking about wanting to change how we do astronomy – change access, change the embargo system, change even peer-review. He’s not the only one: All across the internets we’ve seen open science projects of various types crop up and slowly take root. This summer, I finally let Fraser infect me with the idea of creating a wall free environment for learning and doing science; an online community where people come together to attend astronomy lectures, to participate in star parties, to talk about the science they are working to do in their own backyard, and the science they are working to do in their own web browser.

This ideal is what we’re going to try and build with CosmoQuest.

In October we announced our plans at the “European Planetary Science Conference” ; we started looking for partners, and we started building websites. The first 80% was done by Dec 25 (I love my team of programmers).

For the past several weeks, I haven’t slept very much as we worked to finish. On Dec 31, we had the first 95% done, and launched in beta. That last 5% though – the evil details of error checking, and caching, and user design, and… and all the niggling details – it has been keeping us up at night.

Finally, I think I’m ready to share in beta. This is a community project, so we’re asking you – our wished for community – to help us look at the beta and figure out what can we do make this someplace you want to hangout online? We want this to be some place you want to hangout.

And I’ll be hanging out on Google Plus listening to what you have to say. I’ll open a google hangout periodically just to chat. Join me? Let’s build a place to do science together.

CosmoQuest

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

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

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

(All times are GMT-6 / Central time)

Monday

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Got sucked into web updates.

More to come I hope!

Image by Alan Friedman of Archimedes Crater

Twas the week after Christmas, when all through the halls
Not a student was stirring – they’d gone out to the malls
The professors were all doing their research with care
In hopes that peer review would be gentle and fair.

The servers were whirring all snug on the cloud
While theorists muttered their equations out loud
With data in columns, I figured and plotted
Checking every t’s crossed and every I dotted

When from the fax room there arose such a clatter
I sprang to my feet cursing what ‘er was the matter
Away to my door I flew in a flash
Slaming it shut, my actions perhaps a bit rash

The noise from my stomach on this once quiet morn
Told it was time for a break for popcorn
When, what on my microwave snack should appear
But a schematic sleigh, and eight handdrawn reindeer?

With a few quiet curses, so creative a quick
I knew in a moment who’d played me this trick
More rapid than eagles his Christmas fails came
I opened my door, and looking about I called him by name

Now, Belstein! Doctor Belstein, Each year at this time
The telescope, the servers, something new you undermine
From the top of the mountain, to this very popcorn
You treat everyones stuff with contempt and with scorn

As old papers that under the suns UV rays
When they meet with some handling, crumple away
As he rose out of his chair, and came tottering my way
I regretted my words, and wished in my office I’d stayed

He was dressed all in wool, from ankle to shoulder
And his cloths were nerd chic with their fancy pen holder
A bundle of printouts he held tight in his hand
And he was mighty annoyed about having to stand

His eyes-how they pierced! His forehead so crinkled!
His cheeks were flushed hot, His shirt was so wrinkled!
His droll little mouth was drawn into a frown
And the hair on his head limply hung down

He was chubby and plump, a right chunky old prof
Why oh why had I dared tick him off
The red of his eye and the twist of his head,
Soon gave me to know I had all things to dread.

He spoke just a phrase, before getting to work.
“I found him”, he said, then turned with a jerk.
And using a red sharpie he wrote on my door
A series of symbols no one had thought to explore
He want back to his chair, as I gave a low whistle
Santa’s sleigh flew on a neutrino-powered missile
Somehow faster than light, he flew faster than sight
Problem solved! QED! And to all a good-night

online everywhere

I’m currently sort of on vacation. I say “sort of” because modern day technology and society combine to really makes it impossible for many of us to be totally off work, totally away for a couple of days, and totally removed from instantaneous communications. Everyday of this trip, either my husband, or I, or both have received an “urgent”, “high priority” or “need response immediately” email or text message. He is trying to figure out how to set up a telecon tomorrow (that isn’t during dinner), and I’ve been sorting paperwork. As people working in technological fields (I do astronomy-related new media and he is a Flex and Java programming consultant), we are caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is our soft money reality. I live grant to grant and he works contract to contract, and we can’t afford to miss any opportunities. The hard place is our high tech existence. We have in our cruise cabin enough technology to run a high tech startup, and the people we work with know they can count on us as needed.

(Here is where I insert a disclaimer: I love what I do. I am a work-a-holic. This is not meant as a complaint as much as a essay pointing out the reality that we find ourselves in. Without the outside world intruding, I’d use the time doing graphical design or writing. That’s just how I’m wired.)

Our situation isn’t unique. In our current economy, where a jobless recovery means we are all doing more and earning the same paycheck, redundancy in the workplace just doesn’t exist. For instance, Astronomy Cast’s website stopped displaying images for mysterious (likely hacked) reasons, and I don’t have a staff member capable of fixing the site for me, so later today, when I’m not 40 minutes from needing to run, I’ll be working to fix the website or (if I’m bandwidth limited) to document everything that needs done for Fraser. I also know that if Pingdom warns me IceHunters is down, that’s on me too. In our modern world, more and more people are living this type of a “crap – I actually am in a vital role” existence. There are times that it is nice to actual not be required.

This is having a couple major effects on us both as a society, and as humans in bodies not designed for this type of stress.

As a society, we seem to be creating this spiraling-out-of-control set of “always on” expectations. It is not unusual to get requests Friday afternoon for things that need to be done by Monday morning. This isn’t a problem with my institution. The requests I get are as likely to be from a collaborator working on a grant, as from a grant officer needing a last minute review, as from a magazine editor needing a last minute set of revisions to a story. It is not unusual to have colleagues spread across timezones requesting telecons / Skype-cons / webex meetings at hours spanning from 8am to 9pm. I’ve had situations where when I didn’t return an email on a Saturday within 2 hours, my phone started ringing on my actual and Google phone numbers. In a field where jobs are scarce, and money is scarcer, there is always concern that if I say no, if I don’t answer my phone, my email, my text messages, the opportunities those communications represent will instead get passed on to someone else who is able to answer questions at questionable hours. The only way to fix this societal “always on” mentality is for everyone to change at once – for everyone to say enough is enough, weekends aren’t for work, and after dinner isn’t either, and for all of us to shut our laptops off and take a personal timeout to live.

But that’s not going to happen. Right now, the person who draws a line in the sand and says, “I don’t work weekends” is labeled lazy and irresponsible. I hear these comments from senior faculty and senior researchers. They say, “So and so will never make it. They don’t take work home or come in on weekends.” I remember my last few weeks of undergrad getting called into one of my professor’s offices. At the time I was working 29 hours a week, had leadership positions in several clubs, and was maintaing a 3.7 GPA. I didn’t sleep very much. At least I didn’t think I did. The professor who called me into his office said he wanted to give me a bit of advice as I prepared to enter graduate school. He was concerned that if I wanted to succeed, I really needed to learn to sleep less and work more. I just kind of blinked at him. Now, roughly 15 year later, I realize he was right, and I have learned to get by on less sleep and to simply always do more.

This societal expectation that we have (and this may be a mostly US / Northern Europe / Australian kind of thing) that the successful will be constantly engaged  in work (or something like going to the gym) for 16 hours a day, every day is having physical consequences on many of us. For me, I admit, constant worry about getting everything done and everything funded manifests itself as weight gain (stupid stress hormones), worsened allergies (stupid stress related immune reaction), and insomnia (which is at least useful when up against deadlines). But I look around my friends and my colleagues and I realize I’m seriously lucky. Lucas Randall, an out going and friendly Aussie I know from TAMOz and Twitter, <a href=”http://t.co/CaJ0qx9″>had an anxiety attack come out of no where</a>. I’ve watched heart issues, blood pressure problems, anxiety, and weight gain to the point of diabetes effect others. I’ve seen in those I’m not too close to, the stress has led to finding doctors who will prescribe Ridalin and Xanax so they can get just that extra edge, and I’ve seen abuse of stronger things. People are pushing and pushing and pushing.

And they are pushing themselves because they love what they do and there just aren’t enough jobs and there just isn’t enough money, and as long someone is willing to work themselves to the bones to stay ahead, we all have to work ourselves to the bones to stay ahead.

And that’s the irony. Some of us are working ourselves literally to death (not me, I’m just working myself to the occasional allnighter) because we love what we do – we are working so hard we no longer know how to go on vacations, and are working so hard we are physically manifesting our stress – we are working so hard because the option of not doing what we do is an option we just can’t accept.

And the only solution I know (other than all of society changing at once) is to take these fields we love and create more jobs. This is a manyfold solution. It would allow people like me to staff things properly so that when I travel I know there is someone on my staff who can do everything I do (I think I’m 2 staff positions away from that, so back to fundraising). It would also mean that my husband could sign contracts 4 weeks out from a new job instead of the current, and stressful, 2 weeks, or sometimes just 2 or 3 days. And it would allow all of us to breath a little bit and fear a little bit less if email needs to go two days (or more) unanswered.

But until the world gets economically sorted out, my cell phone is on and I will respond if Pingdom calls my website’s name.

I’ve procrastinated in answering the question. I have to admit that I’m scared for our future, and that makes it hard to confront. While in general, when professors say “It seems that each year’s students are a little less prepared”, they are basically suffering from a specialized case of the “Back in my day” syndrome, this time that’s not entirely true. Under the “No Child Left Behind” act, test scores in the key fields of math and reading mattered so much that in some cases other subjects – including science – weren’t taught in all grades, but were rather focused on during the years they were tested. This means that where once kids got science every year of grades K-12 – at least in the form of getting to watch caterpillars become butterflies in kindergarten, and growing seedlings in 2nd grade – now kids may only get science every 3 years.(2) Every year since its passage during the Bush administration, a new batch of kids entered grade school and a new batch graduated. With every successive year, the kids graduating have spent more years under “No Child Left Behind”, and every successive year the kids have become less prepared for college in those areas that aren’t tested by the standardized tests.

It is my hope that whatever comes after “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) will be able to change our current slump into poor performance in the STE (and often M) parts of STEM.

To fix things,  a lot of repair work needs to be done. If you’ve ever built something, you know that it is sometimes just easier (and cheaper!) to tear something down and rebuild from scratch than it is to repair what you’ve got. With a kid’s education, however, we don’t have the option of using a sledge hammer to return everything to flat so that we can just start the building process over again. This means that in building a vision for STEM moving into the next decade, we need to include in our vision mechanisms to repair the harm NCLB has done. This means this vision needs to include ways to reignite that flame of science enthusiasm most children have when small – when they go through that dinosaurs and planets loving phase – and then feed that flame with as much inspirational content as possible. We have to both revive a starved curiosity and make up for material never learned in youth. This isn’t easy, but if we want to have a society that supports science it must be done. Put more positively, we have to inspire child-like curiosity while providing rigorous content.

Before I go any further, I have to acknowledge the added challenge of trying to teach science to a post-scientific society. Due to a lack of belief in vaccinations, the US society has lost its herd-immunity to deceases such as mumps, measles, and whopping cough. Recently, a Facebook group that facilitated parents purposely giving their kids chicken poxs instead of simply vaccinating them was in the news. The US hasn’t signed onto to the Kyoto climate protocols in part because the lobbying power of “climate skeptics;” people who turn a blind eye on scientific data showing conclusively that our planet is warming. Evolution is still not consistently taught due to the control of Christian conservatives over school systems (and in some cases just because teachers find it easier to not teach evolution than to deal with the wrath of parents), and Big Bang cosmology is missing from astronomy lessons designed to be as inoffensive as possible to those who may believe the universe is as young as a few thousand years old. I don’t know how our society achieved such an anti-scientific state. It shames me to see how we have culturally gone backwards as multiculturalism has been used as an excuse to label science as a culture and as something one isn’t required to believe in. If we are going to build a society rich in people who understand and support science, those of us who are scientifically literate need to find ways to respectfully say, “you are wrong” to people who choice to believe things not supported by the observational reality of our world and our universe. While one should be as respectful as possible of another’s religious beliefs, beliefs aren’t facts, and believing in something doesn’t make it true. Data, repeatably acquired and confirmed by more than one scientist: that is what makes something true. As a community, scientists need to consistently promote a data driven view of reality, and we need to work to get critical thinking, data analysis, and, well, reality into the classrooms.

This starts to define a picture of what STEM education must look like as we move forward. We have set of required outcomes: Must inspire child-like curiosity, must have a high efficacy in order to transfer a lot of content (and thus make up for lost time), must create people who want to see the data behind statements like “vaccines cause autism,” must demonstrate that we live in an evolving universe that is both physically and biologically changing over time due to a variety of driving forces. These basic science concepts need to be taught within the context of a world that relies on engineering solutions to problems, using technology to communicate, and that has statistics driving everything from medical research to economic models.

I don’t have the silver bullet of an idea that can address all these needs, but I do think the above problems suggest ways to concentrate our efforts and funding as we move forward. To inspire child-like curiosity, we need to expose kids (and adults!) to STEM content that is so amazing that they can’t help but forget their learned inhibitions and they revert to the “Why? How? What?” of a captivated child. This is something that can we done through effective communications of modern research and it may be most effectively done through kids magazines (remember the ones that came with the book order forms in elementary school on the ’80s? Anyone remember what they were called?), through after school and museum / science center focused programs, and through public outreach programs such as movies, TV shows, podcasts, and blogs that work to inspire through communications. To be effective, it is important that each of these mechanisms for inspiration be scaffolded with a system that facilitates questions and answers, and community building (e.g. with classroom discussions, online forums, and other discussion mechanisms).

With a healthy curiosity in place, it is also necessary to engage a healthy skepticism. This many require a fundamental change in how science is taught in some places . There is a temptation when teaching (and I know I’ve fallen prey to it at times) to teach science as a series of facts connected by equations and experiments. What is missing from this paradigm is the story of how we know what we know. When confronted with a new fact or theory, a skeptical thinker should ask, “But how do you know that?” If we expect our students to simply take what we say as gospel, then we are raising them up to see science as a faith-based system, and any “authority” figure can easily step in teach them any crazy idea is true. If we instead teach them science as a series of facts and theories that are derived from data and experiments, and if we can teach them there should be a line of evidence, mathematical proof, or other set of data demonstrating what we teach them, then we train them to expect evidence to back up what people tell them, and people without evidence will have a much harder time tricking them later.

One content area that can be used to convey the “How we know” part of science is the story of the universe itself. From Big Bang cosmology, to the evolution of the earth through plate tectonics and geology, to evolutionary biology itself, we live a universe that is ever changing and that conveniently leave evidence of how it is changing in both this cosmic and terrestrial fossil record. Each of these scientific areas has multiple lines of evidence, and an interesting human story behind the discoveries. They also lead naturally into a discussion of the planet and universe’s future. Part of teaching students not only what we know, but how we know it includes engaging them directly in data, and in these areas, there is often data that students can find intellectually accessible. In fact, many different scientific lines of study have data sets that can be meaningfully analyzed by students.

In the current digital era, many of the sciences possess more data than can be readily analyzed by the professional scientific community. From protein folding simulations to animal behavior videos to astronomical images, data exists in abundance that needs a pair of human eyes to analyze it in a way that computers at this time can’t be programed to do. Many different citizen science projects exist to facilitate everyday people – including students – participating in data analysis, and in many cases curricula exist to help students solve basic problems using the data they look at. This type of an exercise can serve two different purposes: It gets students’ hands dirty doing actual science and it provides a context for learning statistics. Recent motivational work done to try and understand why adults participate in citizen science found that many of them said they always wanted to be a scientist, but then didn’t become one because they didn’t feel they were capable. By providing students an experience being part of the scientific process, confidence in their own competency as a scientist can be instilled at an early age. At the same time, the importance of teaching statistics within a meaningful context can’t be stressed enough.

It is amazingly easy to twist statistics in ways that obscurate reality. From polling results that say “Candidate X has pulled into the lead” when in reality Candidate X is statistically tied with two others, to medical studies that stress how on new medicine A 55 people out of 70 had their symptoms improve after just 3 days without stressing that the same thing happened in 53 out of 70 people not on medicine A, and across so many other examples people get mislead by misused numbers. By teaching statistics in a meaningful context that allows students to understand both a data-driven research study and the statistics used to describe it, statistics can be made more tangible. With a solid understanding of statistics, students will not only ask “How do you know that?” but they will also ask “How many standard deviations above background is that result?” and “What was the margin of error in that result?”(3)

With a strong grounding in science as a process and statistics as a way of understanding significance, it become possible to apply the problem solving methods of science to engineering new solutions to new problems. From devising the experiments (how do you determine how different genes in guppies are linked, and which are dominant?) to devising solutions to problems (how do you use a Lego robot and camera to build a log cabin with 4 different colored walls?) science teaches the problem solving skills needed in engineering and utilizes technology in all of its myriad forms.

Unfortunately, putting these ideas into practice through a complete reworking of the educational system isn’t practical. There may be a backdoor though. Through different science funding strands it is possible to get money for education that is related directly to a research projects. The NASA ROSES programs, HST observing programs, and many NSF grants all offer these educational supplants. This funding can be used to create teacher professional development programs, classroom curricula, and after school programs that work to create the needed materials, and change education one classroom at a time.

The exact amount of money available for education fluctuates over time. With NASA ROSES grants, you can request $10k per year per grant. Many NASA missions spend a couple percent of the mission budget on education and public outreach. NSF is more varied, where money can come in the form of a student intern (an REU student) or an educational supplement) and amounts can vary greatly.

What worries me is the future of this funding. As budgets get tighter, something has to give. In the past, NASA has reduced the budget spent on EPO more than once. I don’t know if NSF has done the same, but in the funding-restricted future, the temptation has got to be there. Both these agencies are STEM funding agencies, not STEM education funding agencies. But in a way, by funding STEM education we are funding future science by creating the people who are prepared to do science in the future. The Department of Education has its hands full with all the other parts of education, and current developments under NCLB make it clear science is not their priority. If we want to protect STEM, it is the people in the STEM fields who need to do that protecting.

I’m listening to my iPod while typing and the song I’m listening to just had the lyric “I wish it were simple but we give up easily, you’re close enough to see that.”(4)  I think everyone reading this is close enough to know that we all wish fixing education was easy, but we do give up easily. We gave up under NCLB, and rather than fighting a harmful piece of educational legislation, we have lived with it and simply complained while trying to help out in small corners, in random classrooms where we could. In this moment, as congress works to define what comes after NCLB, we need to fight for something better. Today, as NSF and other agencies work to fit their programs into narrowing budgets, we need to fight convince them that the money they spend on education is money they should continue to spend on education. We need to find a way to reform education so that graduates in the future are STEM curious problem solvers who are also statistically literate and driven to always ask, “How do you know that?”

Can we work to fund and build that future?

(1) STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics

(2) This is because under NCLB schools only require “science assessments to be administered at least once during grades 3-5; grades 6-9; and grades 10-12.” (http://www2.ed.gov/nclb/accountability/ayp/testing-faq.html)

(3) I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t make since to reduce the amount of geometry and trigonometry taught in school and introduce statistics. While students going into STEM careers need as much calculus as they can get, I’m really not sure who, other than math majors, needs to know how to do a geometric or trigonometric proof, and to perhaps say something scandalous, I’d nix most of the prof writing from both those classes and combine them into one year to make space for a course on statistics.

(4) KT Tunstall “Otherside of the World” from Eye to the Telescope

Hanny & the Mystery of the Voorwerp

For you I’d like to offer this: Comic books are cheap, easy to mail, and roll nicely to fit in stockings (don’t do this to a collectable!! Those go under the tree in something with a cardboard backing). I personally have about 1000 Hanny and the Mystery of the Voorwerp Comics in my home, office, and my staff member Joe’s home and office waiting to get shipped. If you have a kid in your life, someone who acts like a kid in your life, or basically anyone in your life who breaths, please get them a comic. Please? $5.50+shipping (global).

That out of my system, I have to admit that since I got involved in facilitating the creation of the Hanny and the Mystery of the Voorwerp, I’ve had people approach me to say “Hey, have you seen this science-based comic?” (For full disclosure, this is often someone who puts a comic in my hands, and the two comics I’m about to mention have landed in my inbox and mailbox for free, but I liked them anyway )

It's Alive! by James Lu Dunbar

If you are looking for a comic for that kid who may not get exposed to the Big Bang and Evolution in their home, then James Dubnar has a pair of (I’d call them graphic novels) science solutions. They are rhymed and illustrated in a way that should appeal to 3rd-5th graders everywhere (and likely middle schoolers and parents, but those two groups may be less willing to admit they love them). I think these would be a lot of fun to read aloud with a kid and then talk about what’s being read. You can order copies from James & Kenneth Publishers.

Now, none of these comics mentioned so far are honest to God comic books. If you are a true comic book snob, you will scoff at them. I am not a comic book snob. I like comic books, but have to admit I tend to be the person who only randomly buys the compilations. I have the Watchman, Sandman vol 1 & 2 (why are they so so so expensive?), a few X-Men, both Umbrella Academy Series, and then a box of all the early 1990′s Battlestar Galactica comics and a lot of X-file comics (I am way more of a fan girl than a comic book girl). While I can’t pretend to hold my own in a DC versus Marvel debate, I can still identify a real comic book when I see one, and this season there is an actual comic book of the super hero variety out that promotes science and education.

Mister Terrific, issue 1 cover

It’s by DC and called Mister Terrific. The hero (that would be Mister Terrific) is a the third smartest man in the world, and he is a black, olympic medal earning, billionaire. The comic book does touch on race and seems to be working to be socially relevant and to create positive African American role models. I have to admit, the social commentary is much more interesting than the ways they include science. This isn’t a comic you will learn a whole lot from – it is science fiction and built on the tenet that smarts wins. That’s a pretty good tenet. But the science in this comic is often made up (sonic black holes sound cool, but physically don’t make a lot of sense). Still, if you, like me, like extrapolated science like in “Fringe,” and if (perhaps more importantly) you have someone else in your life who likes comics and “Fringe,” this may be the comic for you and for you to gift. If you want this one, I strongly recommend going to your local comic book store. Really. Local businesses need your business, and comic books stores are rarely chain stores, so give an small business owner your business this shopping season.

Now, I know these can’t be all that’s out there. Below are the comments. Have at it. I want to hear all about the comics I don’t know about.

And please please buy a Hanny and the Mystery of the Voorwerp. I want my shelf space back!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please help?

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

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

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.

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

Lunar Phase Calendar by Dimitre Lima

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

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

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

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

So… Get engaged in the moon.

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

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

Goal: Setup on EC2 an Ubuntu server configured to run PHP software on an Apache Server connected to a MySQL database on an RDS (This is a LAMP server)

Uses: This type of configuration can be used for WordPress, phpBB, SMF, and any number of other php online toys

Notes: There are two ways to set this up servers. You can either go through the online GUI or use a commandline toolkit. For advanced features you have to use the command line, but… For basic setup you can just use the GUI. Also: Amazon does not allow capital letters and _ marks in all situations. It is easiest just to avoid uppercase and underscores at all times.

Step 0: Go sign up for AWS. Give them your credit cards, acknowledge this won’t be free. There is a good tutorial here, and it is worth going through, starting and terminating a server.

Step 1: Setup a Database. This step takes the longest for Amazon to process, so get it going first and it will be ready for you to configure things when you are done getting your EC2 server setup in the next step

• Sign into your AWS console
• On the RDS tab, set up a mysql db. Set up a 5GB instance and otherwise use all the defaults
• Add a security group other than default (I called my web)
• come back later and…. When the DB is finished setting up, modify it to add the new security group so it shows “default, web”

Step 2: Get security keys. You will need a whole variety of security keys. Might as well set them all up now. These can be found under AWS Account > Security Credentials

• X.509 certificate and private key file (rename these to something useful. I use X509cert_instancename.pem and X509priv_instancename.pem
• AWS account id
• Keypair (I use the naming convention key_pk_instancename.pem // key_rsa_instancename.pem)

When you have all the Keypairs, put them somewhere you won’t lose them (I use ~/.ssh on my local machine)

Step 3: Create an EC2 server. The set of default Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) may not include what you want. These change regularly, and when I setup my server they were useless. A complete list of AMIs can be found on the Cloud Market. Official Ubuntu installs are posted by the user “Canonical.” I found the most recent for the current stable version of Ubuntu. On 1/22/2011 this was Maverik Merrkat and ami-c0a959a9.

• Go to the Cloud Market to find the AMI you want and note the code number
• Sign into your AWS console
• On the EC2 tab, launch a new instance. To use the AMI you selected, click on the “Community AMIs” tab and type in the code number you noted above. I just used default values for everything
• For you sanity, give the instance a name. You may find your self growing servers like mushrooms
• You will be prompted to create a new keypair – this is required for you to login. Save it to ~/.ssh (naming convention instancename.pem)
• Create a security group with the same name you used for the DB (you’ll still need to link them).
• Add default ports for HTTP, HTTPS, MySQL, SSH for the whole internet
• While it is launching, go to the RDS tab > DB Security Groups, and edit the security group you created in step 1 to include the EC2 security group you just created (you’ll also need the account ID, which can be found under account > security credentials)
• NOTE: If the Public DNS is ec2-123-456-78-90.compute-1.amazonaws.com the IP is 123.456.78.90

Step 4: Login to your server and set up user. Initially your server will only require the keypair in order for you to login. This is mostly safe, but you likely want to force a password as well. It is also good to not do all your work as root.

• Note: The username varies with type of instance. For ubuntu it’s ubuntu
  localhost:.ec2 $ ssh -i instancename.pem username@ecX-XX-XXX-XXX-XX.compute-X.amazonaws.com
  This will provide you a regular command line login
• Setup the new user :~$ sudo useradd -d /home/username -m -s /bin/bash username
  :~$ sudo passwd username
Enter new UNIX password: NEWPASSWORD
Retype new UNIX password: NEWPASSWORD
passwd: password updated successfully
• You also need to add to the sudo file
  :~$ sudo visudo
  Go to the line ALL = (ALL) ALL and add the new user following example of admin (the leading % not needed)
• Give the user ssh access
  :~$ sudo cp /etc/ssh/sshd_config /etc/ssh/sshd_config.original
:~$ sudo chmod a-w /etc/ssh/sshd_config.original Change PasswordAuthentication to yes
:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart

Step 5: Update your distribution and install LAMP and EC2 Tools. The Ubuntu AMI you started is a plain install of Ubuntu and doesn’t have all the libraries you need. That’s ok. These are easy to get via apt.

• Log back into your instance as the user you just created.
• Install updates
  :~$ sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude dist-upgrade
• Reboot
  :~$ sudo reboot
• Log back in and use apt to get needed software
  :~$ sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql postfix mysql-client unzip php5-memcache php5-curl memcached php5-gd
:~$ sudo a2enmod rewrite headers expires
  Say yes to all options, including the mysterious postfix options
• Check if it works by going to your public IP or public DNS. You should see a basic apache test page
• Install the EC2 Tools after enabling multiverse
  :~$ sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.backup
• And edit the sources.list file so that all the multiverse lines are uncommented.
• Update the list of apt files and then install the commandline ec2 tools. You’ll need these if you ever need to configure dynamic servers.
  :~$ sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install ec2-api-tools
• Copy your certificates to your .ssh directory. From your local machine
  localmachine: $ scp -i ~/.ssh/instancename.pem X509priv_instancename.pem X509cert_instancename.pem ubuntu@ec2-67-202-7-11.compute-1.amazonaws.com:~/.
• Configure on the EC2 instance your Bash profile (and the user you created’s profile) to include the following lines
  export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=$HOME/.ssh/X509priv_instancename.pem
export EC2_CERT=$HOME/.ssh/X509cert_instancename.pem
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/
  And then enable these features using :~$ source .bashrc

Step 6: Test MySQL. Call me paranoid, but this is a whole lot of work to have something not work.

• Test ability to connect to db from command line
  mysql -u [Master User name] --password=[Master Password] -h [Endpoint hostname]
• That should work! If it doesn’t, um… Google.

Step 7: Setup Virtual Host. By default, your server wants all its web files in /var/www. This is fine, but requires a whole lot of sudo (or permissions changing), and limits your ability to have a bunch of applications (potentially with different domain names) all on the one server. This is a rather boring virtual host that simply sets up a project folder. I assume you are working as ‘username’ and the code is in ~username/public_html/Project and if you are allowing uploads, they are in ~username/public_html/Project/uploads.

• Backup the apache default config incase you step on something, then create copy to change and change it
  :~/ sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/default.original
:~/ sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default.original /etc/apache2/sites-available/ProjectName
:~/ sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/ProjectName
  Edit the file to look like
  <VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
DocumentRoot /home/username/public_html/Project
<Directory /home/username/public_html/Project>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
</Directory>


  # Don't let anything in wp-content/uploads be executed as php
<Directory /home/username/public_html/Project/uploads>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
<IfModule mod_php5.c>
php_admin_flag engine off
</IfModule>
AddType text/plain .html .htm .shtml .php .php3 .phtml .phtm .pl
</Directory>

  ErrorLog /home/username/public_html/Project/logs/error.log
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /home/username/public_html/Project/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

• disable the default site: :~/$ sudo a2dissite default
• enable the new configuration :~/$ sudo a2ensite ProjectName
• restart apache :~/$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
• Create a test file in your new directory: vi /home/username/public_html/Project/test.php
  Include in the file the code
• Copy the test.php file to the uploads directory
• Test both files. The first should show a php config file, the second should show the file contents

Step 8: Connect to MySQL via php. This should be the hint you need to do everything else.

• Create a mysql test file :~/public_html/Project$ vi mysqltest.php
• make the file contents
  <?php
//connection to the database
$con = mysql_connect("name.abc123def456.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com",root,"PASSWORD") or die(mysql_error());
echo "Database connected.";
?>
• Go to the webpage for mysqltest.php (http://SERVERNAME/mysqltest.php). This should give you a “Database connected” message

Optional: SAVE your AMI in case you need it later

• Upload your private key and x509 certificate if you haven’t yet (and you should have, but…).
  localhost: $ scp -i ~/.ssh/instancename.pem X509priv_instancename.pem X509cert_instancename.pem ubuntu@ec2-67-202-7-11.compute-1.amazonaws.com:~
• And then on the Amazon image, move them to /mnt
  :~$ sudo mv ~/*_instancename.pem /mnt
• Next export everything
  :~$ sudo ec2-bundle-vol -d /mnt -k /mnt/X509priv_instancename.pem -c /mnt/X509cert_instancename.pem -u -r x86_64 -p sampleimage
  (Use apt-get as needed and indicated by error messages)
• check that it is there with
  :~$ ls -l /mnt/sampleimage.*
• upload it with
  :~$ ec2-upload-bundle -b [name of s3 bucket that will be created] -m /mnt/sampleimage.manifest.xml -a AWS-ACCESS-KEY-ID -s AWS-SECRET-KEY --location US

Optional: Download and install the Amazon API Tools locally

• Create ~/.ec2
• cp your 4 .pem files to ~/.ec2
• Download and unzip the Amazon API Command Line Tools and move the bin and lib to ~/.ec2.
• Your directory should now look like this
  styx:.ec2 $ ls
UserID_PK.pem
UserID_PUB.pem
X509cert_instancename.pem
X509priv_instancename.pem
bin
lib
• You also need to configure some environmental variables. Edit you ~/.bash_profile to include the text below at the end.
  # Setup Amazon EC2 Command-Line Tools
export EC2_HOME=~/.ec2
export PATH=$PATH:$EC2_HOME/bin
export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=`ls $EC2_HOME/X509priv_instancename.pem`
export EC2_CERT=`ls $EC2_HOME/X509cert_instancename.pem`
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home/
• When you are done editing your bash_profile, you will need to use restart your shell
  styx:.ec2 $ source ~/.bash_profile
• Check if it works
  styx:.ec2 $ cd ~/.ec2
styx:.ec2 $ ec2-describe-images -o amazon
• This will produce a list of available EC2 Images. Grep can be used to find specific features.