From Shanghai to Chicago on American

In case you somehow missed it, 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy. For me, that has translated into the International Year of Astronomy Travel. According to my American Advantage account, I’ve earned 71,616 qualifying miles for this year to date. Now admittedly, that included bonus miles, minimum mile increases, and two for one miles, so my actual miles traveled is somewhat less, but as I’ve visited Long Beach, Eastern Illinois, Oxford, Kansas City, New York, Ontario (California), Pasadena, Oxford (again), Minneapolis, Seattle, Shanghai, Cheju, Fukuoka, Nagasaki, Kagoshima, Rio de Janeiro, and Greenwich, well, let’s just say it’s time to buy a new suitcase. And the travel isn’t over! I have two more big trips this month, and then AAVSO and dotAstronomy in November and December.

Here be Dragons (and more)

Dragon*Con

Next weekend, Labor Day weekend, I’ll be at Dragon*Con, along with Phil Plait, George Hrab, and the SkepChicks.

A Full Moon for Cancer

While there won’t exactly be a fan meetup at Dragon*Con, I would like to extend a personal invitation to all of you to the “A Full Moon for Cancer” Star Party, in memory of the Blue Collar Scientist, Jeff Medkeff. Phil Plait and I will be hosting this event on Thursday September 3 at the Bradley Observatory at Agnes Scott College. All proceeds from the event will go to the American Cancer Society.

The Main (Dragon*Con) Event

Here is my current schedule:

• Title: Feminine Mystique: Women in Engineering & Science
  Time: Fri 02:30 pm Location: 203 – Hilton (Length: 1)
  Description: Women make their mark! These engineers & scientists explain how they got involved, what they do & how to get your sisters & daughters to do the same.
  Panel: G. Mauldin-Kinney, Dr. P. Gay, L. Burns, T. Ray, K. Steadman
• Title: Citizen Science
  Time: Sat 11:30 am Location: 202 – Hilton (Length: 1)
  Description: Science wouldn’t be where it is today without the contributions of everyday people like you. Learn how to take part in all of the fun.
  Speaker: Dr. Pamela L. Gay
• Title: The Big Bang: How It All Got Started
  Time: Sat 05:30 pm Location: 203 – Hilton (Length: 1)
  Description: It started atomically small & is still expanding. What was the Big Bang & how do we know it happened.
  Speaker: Dr. Pamela L. Gay
• Title: The Astronomer, the Alien Hunter, and a UFO Skeptic
  Time: Sat 07:00 pm Location: Crystal Ballroom – Hilton (Length: 1)
  Description: Three of the worlds leading researchers, and skeptics, discuss the state of UFO and Alien paranoia here and around the world.
  Moderator / MC for panel: Pamela L. Gay
  Panel: Phil Plait, Seth Shostak, J. Nickell
• Title: Are We Alone: A Discussion
  Time: Sun 10:00 am Location: 207 / 206 / 205 – Hilton (Length: 1)
  Description: Seth Shostak discusses the current public outreach goals of SETI, and how using the skeptical mindset relates to the work at SETI as a whole.
  Panel: Drs. Phil Plait, Seth Shostak, and Pamela L. Gay
• Title: AstronomyCast LIVE!
  Time: Sun 02:30 pm Location: 204 – Hilton (Length: 1)
  Description: Join Dr. Pamela Gay, the award winning host of “The Astronomy Cast” and her special guest, SETI’s Seth Shostak.
  Panel: Drs Pamela L. Gay and Seth Shostak
• Title: Galaxy Zoo
  Time: Sun 07:00 pm Location: 203 – Hilton (Length: 1)
  Description: Citizen science. Ordinary people helping to classify thousands of galaxies.
  Speaker: Dr. Pamela L. Gay
• Title: Brazilianisms – Live!
  Time: Mon 10:00 am Location: 204 – Hilton (Length: 1)
  Description: Kinsey Swartz brings his international podcast about an American living in Brazil, to Dragon*Con!
• Title: Backyard AstroPhysics – You Don’t Need a Ph.D to Do Astronomy
  Time: Mon 02:30 pm Location: 203 – Hilton (Length: 1)
  Description: Our glorious night sky. Love astronomy but fear ‘physics’? You can have the wonders of our universe with ease in your own backyard.
  Panel: Drs Bill Keel and Pamela L. Gay

I will also be sitting at the International Year of Astronomy table in the Hilton during these hours: Friday 10am-12pm &4pm-5pm; Saturday 10am-11am; Sunday 12pm-2pm; and Monday 12pm-2pm. Come by, say hi, and register for a chance to win a Galileoscope!

The Astronomical Society of the Pacific Meeting

And September 12-16, I’ll be at what may be the worst conference venue ever: The San Fransisco Airport Westin will host the 120th Annibersary meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. I love the work the ASP does, I just really wish this meeting wasn’t at the airport of one of the coolest cities in the US (then again – maybe this is how they keep us at the meeting). I will be arranging a fan meet up once I have my full schedule. I suspect I’m going to aim for Wednesday night somewhere other than the airport

Somewhere over Florida

And a final word on traveling…

So far, I have to admit, I’ve faired fairly well. I’ve spent the night only once in Chicago. While my luggage was lost twice in 2008, I managed to keep my luggage with me so far through 2009. I’ve managed to keep my personal loses to a minimum. In addition to misplacing the standard small flock of miniature bottles of toiletries and hair elastics (no big deal), I also shed a pair of favorite sun glasses, a travel pillow, and the two prong square bit that allows me to plug my Mac power brick into a US wall. All in all, not too bad. I think I also misplaced some of my sanity, which I do miss, but I’m hoping to find it again sometime in 2010.

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

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

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

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

My grades are posted.

My students have received their grades.

I am 3 forms (paperwork will kill me) from starting my summer.

And I plan to play a bit, write a lot, travel too much, and try and remember how to jump horses over itty bitty fences designed to restrain dachunds.

w00t

About a year ago I went to the UK for the first time and along with attending an AAVSO meeting, I also spend a couple days at Oxford, where I was hosted by Galaxy Zoo PI Chris Lintott. We got to talking, got to brainstorming, and came up with some ideas to add new features to the Galaxy Zoo website. (See here for some hints of what’s to come). He came and visited me at SIUE a few months later, we wrote some grants, we then got some grants (w00t), and now I find my life delightfully consumed not only by the International Year of Astronomy (which you likely knew), but also by Galaxy Zoo. I can’t wait to reveal things to you over the next few months.

Between IYA and Galaxy Zoo, the past few months have become a tangle of teaching, travel, programming, and working on research papers. Four months in, my dogs now know what suitcases mean, my office is a mass of paper (in some places centimeters deep), and life is good.

In the following months, here are things you can expect:

• April 3-4 MARAC: Live near Kansas City? Come hear me give a talk at the Mid-America Regional Astrophysics Conference
• April 18-19 NEAF: I’ll be talking at the NorthEast Astronomy Forum , but the real reason I’ll be there is to steal views through the diversity of scopes guaranteed to be in attendance.
• May 18-21 AAVSO: This years AAVSO spring meeting is being held jointly with the Society for Astronomical Sciences at Big Bear Lake, CA. It is a beautiful location and the workshops look as good as the scenery.
• June 7-11 AAS: We’ll be revealing a bit of what is to come with Galaxy Zoo and talking a lot about New Media and Citizen Science. Come and see?
• July 2-5 CONvergence(here I admit I need to follow up more with organizers): Mostly I’m going to have fun
• July 16-24 Eclipse of the Century Cruise: I’ve never seen a full eclipse, and I’m really looking forward to the many minute totality.
• August IAU: The last time IAU held a General Assembly Pluto was stripped of its position as a planet. What ever madness ensues this time, I’ll be there to take it in.

And here I stop, because at this point I just can’t think beyond IAU. Life is good. It’s just busy.

This week I’m down in Houston for the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Conference. More on that in its own post in just a couple minutes.

British Museam Great Court

So, I have to admit to being a bad person today. I snuck away from working for several hours to explore the British Museum. It was an amazing sun filled day and light streamed in from the sky lights, bringing the outside in to illuminate 1000s of artifacts gathered from around the globe.

One of my favorite pieces of sculpture is at the British Museum, and after getting lost among roomfuls of historic coins, I got to take in what is advertised as the Horse of Selene. I used to have a magnificent horse named Quantum Leap. He died a number of years ago, and there is something in this statue that reminds me of his fight. It is perhaps a foolish thing to compare my own old warm blood to a steed of the Gods, but if Zeus or Apollo are offended, they are welcome to strike me down.

After drinking my fill of the horse of Selene, I took a few, um, hours to wander the world, exploring the artifacts of Africa, Asia, and all the ancient Mediterranean. As I walked from one dead society’s relics to another’s I couldn’t help but think how sad it would now be to visit the sites where these statues once stood.

I love history. I’m not an expert at any of it, and I tend to be poor at remembering details of dates and battles. That said, I love reading about culture, philosophies, and the significance of architecture (and I admit to periodically binge reading archeoastronomy texts). I’ve always dreamed of taking either a biking tour or equestrian tour through the various ruins of Greece, Italy, and/or Turkey.

As I walked among the collections of ancient art and religion I couldn’t help but think about these dreams and think how frustrating it would be to be in Greece (or Italy, or Turkey) staring up at a marble facade that some European antiquarian had carefully stripped of all the interesting bits to put them on display in London. How sad to be there, in that moment, thinking “Well at least I saw the rest last time I was in the UK.”

The thing is, I will, in this fantasy future, be able to say, “Well, I saw them.” There are generations of children growing up in the land of origins for these pieces of art who will never get to experience the full beauty and detail of their heritage.

I know the return of looted, purchased, and otherwise purloined goods is something many governments take very seriously. But you can’t really make a foreign museum return something. Especially when returning these works to their points of origin would subject them to pollution and potential human destruction (war, graffiti, harm from road vibrations, etc)

As I walked, I grew more and more disturbed by this stolen culture. But then something caught my eye. One of the removed roman pillars had a picture beside it explaining that all the original pillars, all shaped like beautiful women, had been removed from the original temple, but in their place now stood a series of replicas. These replacement pillars could happily stand up against pollution and other forms of decay as the sacrifical lambs of the archeological world.

On the flip side, in the Japanese collection were a series of replicas of historic pieces that aren’t allowed out of Japan. These carefully constructed reproductions allow me to taste the art Of Japan from the heart of London, giving me a reason to someday hopefully see some of the original pieces in person.

Admittedly, there are those who would say another word for replica is forgery. But, if we are finding ways to perserve originals and guaruntee access to as large a population as possible, isn’t this a good thing?

I came away from the Museam a fan of replication. I think I’d someday be satisfied to sit on a hillside in Greece (or Italy, or Turkey) and stare on a modem marble replica of a temple of Athena knowing the original was safe inside some museum somewhere.

About an hour ago I finished giving a talk to a physics major seminar course at the University of Nebraska. There were about 40 young minds,  intent and willing to listen. I was there to tell them about what got me into astronomy, what  astronomers do, and what doors are open to different careers. The thing I wanted to stress is that with physics and astronomy you can explore, you can create, you can go beyond just the numbers in the equations.  We don’t get paid  enough to do what we do if we hate it. We can only justify the long hours for low pay and the sometimes crazy travel with a passion that drives us to not be happy unless we’re doing what we do in each of us needs to find our own way.

This is what gets me to this book. Last night on the plane I hit this passage:

We’ve reached the end of pure inspiration, and are now somewhere else, something implying routine, or doing something because people expect us to do it, going somewhere in each day because we went there the day before, saying things because we have set them before, and this seems like the work of a different sort of animal, contrary  to our plan, and this is very very bad.

This section refers to how the author and his coworkers at a magazine feel about the change in how they approach their work.  I have to admit I  have felt this way too. Their project started on a laugh and a dream.  This isn’t very different from research. We get an idea, we decide to create, explore, question, try.  We laugh our way through the project descriptions, working through dinner as we define the first problems, and on that first all-nighter that we  fight through as we work our way through our first grant, it is all still fine, all still worth the lack of sleep,  the lack of life, because at first the project is bigger than any of us  and it is simply the project that must be done.  I have taken risks with my career, deciding to take time away from classic research — variable stars, galaxy evolution, things that you expect to see published in the Astrophysical Journal — deciding to take time away to instead create podcasts ( and research how they impact people), to create websites  (and see how they bring people together), to explore language and learning  (and ask if we communicate what we mean to), and to try and understand how you understand what I’m trying to tell you about the universe. I’ve taken risks to follow passions, each project bigger than me.

But then one day the projects become mundane; they become work.

I still love what I do. The people I work closest with are people whom I respect  and I trust and I suspect I’ll be working with over the decades to come. But those are just the  handful of people I work closest with. Then there’s everyone else, and the work, and the politics, and the paperwork, and the trying to hold it all together and make sure everything gets done. There are days that are simply not fun. There are days when I think about setting it all aside and just writing websites, writing books, just staying at home and creating things that don’t require any approval paperwork. Or at least  there are fractions of days. I don’t think it’s ever been so bad that I’ve considered leaving astronomy for more than an hour or two. But there are days I think about giving up on  this or that  bureaucracy that should make my life easier in the long run, but right now it just makes me miserable. I’ve had the days, it felt like the days in this  book passage, were each of us is simply  “doing something because people expect us to do that.”

These are usually the days when I’m writing not the first grant for a project but the second or third or fifth, and the thing that made the project a joy and a rush  has been forgotten as we battle over budgets and try to figure out just what piece of paper is needed this time and what format is required by this potential funder. These are usually the days when I’m waiting to hear on the grant, to hear on my fate, to find out if I get to follow that dream and answer the question.

They don’t tell you about the waiting in graduate school.  They don’t tell you how you’ll spend six months not knowing if this great idea that you got is something you’ll be funded to do, something  that will be funded before the graduate students who  you wish to work with wander off and graduate and go somewhere else. Like most of the astronomy education community, I’ve been waiting to hear on a NASA  Grant since the middle of the summer. I’m waiting to hear on  an EPO rider on another project, and God  I want to do that project.  It’s like being hungry and only having enough money to order one pizza for you and a friend, and making that call and spending that money  you both scrounged out of your pockets and out of your book bags and then waiting first one hour than two hours than three hours as the pizza never comes. Sometimes you get lucky, and suddenly the pizza arrives with extras — free garlic bread, free soft drinks. But sometimes there’s not even a call to say ‘sorry.’

And in the moments while I’m waiting, I feel like I’m going through the motions. In these moments it’s hard to remember the passion  for the projects that carried us through that sleepless night when we wrote the words that might define the next three years of our lives. It’s hard to remember it as I go through the motions of grading, and posting homework, and writing the second grant for some other project, and as I work on the websites for IYA, and I work on all the random things that have to get done because it’s what’s expected.

But then I travel,  and there, in front of the classroom, in front of the lecture hall, in front of the auditorium I look out on a sea of faces -  a sea of people who don’t know if this is going to be just another boring science lecture or maybe, just this time, maybe it’ll be something exciting, something interesting, something that will make them feel alive and open their mind, open their curiosity, and carry them to another part of the universe. In that moment, as I open my power points, my keynotes, my websites, my videos, as I open the various technologies and look out  and breath in,  I remember what it felt like the first time I fell in love with astronomy. As I exhale my talks, I try to instill life into the audience, and on those days when I hit my stride, and hit my marks saying the things I want to say, I like to think a couple walk away a little bit in love with the parts of astronomy that mean the most  to me. And no matter what they go away with, there is something about watching them come alive, watching them fall into the slides and the ideas and concepts; it makes me feel alive. This is the beauty of teaching. I get to see over and over what it’s like to experience all these wonderful things our sky has to offer for the first time. I get to experience everything anew and fall in love again.

I love to travel. I can only travel when someone else pays my way and sadly it really helps when they pay me because the days I travel are the days I don’t get paid. This is one of the flaws in being a contract soft-money astronomer.

Today, in Nebraska, was a good day when I was reminded that I’m still in love with my research, with teaching, and with trying to communicate astronomy to the public. And today is a day, when I think maybe just maybe a few more people will go to bed wanting to get up the next day and learn more about citizen science, about astronomy podcasts, and about how they can get involved in the International Year of Astronomy.

As long as I have these days, I will always be an astronomer.

The Mythbusters have given me a new reason to keep watching the water heater:

And as a reminder, here’s our Pilot Episode (related to my Husband’s Blog).

FlexMonkeyPatch “Pilot Episode,” is a program to figure out why my husband and I can’t always take hot showers. For mysterious reasons, at completely random intervals, our water heater’s pilot light fails. This usually happens in the middle of the night. Sometimes we’ll be okay for weeks, sometimes it will go out 3 times in 1 day. We’ve had the plumber out several times, and he hasn’t a clue.

Having gotten sick and tired of traipsing in PJs from the 2nd floor bathroom to the basement water heater, my overly technical husband has now setup a webcam on the water heater pilot light. If you see the light go out, can you direct twitter him @turdotherun?

Please help. Without your citizen plumbing, we may not be able to get a repairman to acknowledge we have a problem.

Way back when I was at Michigan State University I had a website on Physics and Astronomy humor that then migrated to U-Texas, and now I share the link with you. I am contemplating resurrecting that site here, but it requires a bit more content. Anyone have any good ones from the days of email forwards?

I miss seeing Jeff’s posts and tweets, and in this strange internet age he remains there in my Google Reader and in my Twitter “Following” list. He is a reminder to me to live every moment, lookup often, and be a mentor and a friend where ever I can. He was an excellent role model and he leaves a legacy of discovery and of people who are able to make new discoveries because of what they learned from him.

Blue Collar Scientist, you are missed.

Take for instance our solar system. Up until 1995 it was the only one with a normal sun we knew of (there were some pulsar planets found earlier). Based on it, and it alone, we built an entire detailed nebular theory of solar system formation that we think is mostly true.

This isn’t the only place in research where instances of “observation” lead to “understanding.” With observational astronomy we at least have the option to go out and search for new data. And sometimes we even find it. Sometimes. And until that sometimes is realized, most astronomers are more than willing to say “This is based on 1 example – we’re looking for more.”

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is an example of large science done well. As it chews through large areas of the sky we’re greatly multiplying the sizes of our samples and the numbers of our examples. Tidal tails were barely understood a dozen years ago, and now we know of many of them wraping like starry spaghetti around our galaxy. The number of overlapping galaxies has jumped from under a thousand to many thousand thanks to SDSS and its child project Galaxy Zoo (which sprang out on its own, via spontaneous, pub fertilized, gestation). The science coming out of SDSS is amazing (and it’s currently being live blogged over here).

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is just the starting point. In the coming years two new large survey telescopes will be coming online. The first is Pan-STARRS, which has a primary mission of trying to find pretty much every medium to large sized rock or chunk of ice out in the solar system threatening to cross the orbit of the Earth. It is set to come online late this year. Following on its heels is the LSST, which presently anticipates seeing first light in 2015 and has science goals of finding the remaining unidentified random small objects in the solar system as well as finding transitory objects like supernovae.

On their way to accomplishing their core missions, these telescope projects will obtain hundreds of images of different areas of pretty much every corner of the sky they are each able to access. By adding these images together we can probe deeper and deeper into the sky as more and more months and years pass by. In this deep means faint, and as we survey the faintest fuzzies of the sky, astronomers will find a new definition of what it means to have a statistically significant data set.

Hopefully, in a couple years, the physicists will joke that astronomers consider a mere 40 or 400 data points as being statistically significant.

Statistically significant is a fancy way to say a result is believable. If you see me toss a basketball into a hoop from 5 meters once, it might be a fluke (or a miracle, more likely). If you see me do it 28 out of 30 times, you can say with statistical certainty that I am capable of accurately throwing basket balls (this would never ever happen). Statistically significant crops up in many places, and we use it for silly reasons. The house I live in is Pink (it’s an old Victorian that once was a farm house). When we bought it my colour blind husband told people it was salmon or mauve or puce. I said it was pink. This lead to us surveying every poor soul who came over about what color they perceived our house to be. Based on a statistically significant sample of about 20 people who answered at the 80% level “Pink” or “Pink or Salmon,” my husband now tells the pizza guy we’re the first pink house after the intersection

This idea of statistical significance applies across all non-theoretical astronomy research. Along with the hard science areas of observational astronomy, high-energy accelerator-based cosmology, and rover / probe based planetary science, astronomy/physics departments sometimes also hide a few soft scientists working on astronomy educational research who can do statistically significant research as well.

In the hard versus soft science discussion, I’m a bit half-baked. Different bits of my research likes to sit on both sides of that fence.

In Astronomy Education Research we have very few large scale surveys. There are the occasional longitudinal studies. Using them I can tell you how performance varies by ethnicity and gender on the GRE. I could tell you how graduating classes matriculate men and women across the decades. There is even some large scale surveying of what type of jobs we get, what classes we take, and who does better on exactly which standardized tests.

But these surveys don’t always help instructors like me get inside my students heads and understand how the specifics of what I do does or does not improve learning. There is no 10,000 person survey to explain if one demonstration of diffraction is better at explaining spectroscopy than another demonstration. In designing my courses, I rely on my personal experience, and I rely on limited case studies. I do have data sets demonstrating demos do deserve to be done. I have facts and figures fully justifying labs. Somethings I know about my formal class thanks to the work of others. But mostly, I have to follow my gut and simply employ what are called best practices (broad concepts like using labs, encouraging student interaction, and keeping my class actively engaged in the content rather then lecturing)

As a new media content provider, I find that the best practices for blogging, podcasting and even YouTube have yet to be defined. (And I’m doing my part, where I can.) As a trained researcher, I get frustrated with comments that all my experience says are true, but I personally don’t have the data (or know of anyone else who has published the data) to back up. For instance, a quick run through YouTube will find videos that qualify as trash, campy, quality, and OMG why. My experience looking at hit numbers tells me that it is the camp and the why that seem to get hit the most. To prove my stomachs interpretation of a not statistically significant data set I’d need to define a way to quantify a video as into a category like “campy,” and then use that metric to classify a few 1000 videos, and then document how many hits those videos received in a known period. To help remove bias, I’d want to do things like only use first time posters, and similar restricting factors to keep my data as easy to understand as possible. Its a question that intrigues me. And if I had a fleet of marketing students, I’d probably put them to work answering these questions.

But I don’t have that fleet, so I answer the questions I can, as I can, and I chew out papers when I can.

And until that data can be gathered, I and others talk in anecdotes. In the press room at AAS, we all talk about the seemly magical combinations of actions that we have to do to get our posts dugg on digg. Sometimes it feels like our not-well-documented anecdotes amount to, “When the moon is full, and I include the word serendipity and bite my tongue while hitting the publish button I hit the front page.” The same is true of some teaching.

The trick is to remember, all we have are our personal anecdotes, and what works for Phil Plait won’t work for me. And what works for Fraser probably won’t work either. And nothing will ever replicate the magic of Astronomy Picture of the Day.

New media is young. Large surveys will come. Just not today. Until then, let the gossip and story telling begin (just don’t claim statistical significance.)

There is a myth in America that off the grid means outside of society. Through mainstream media we’ve been exposed to stories of strange mountain men and members of the Republic of Texas and other rogue groups making their own way off the land via somewhat nefarious means. These law-breaking crazies have brought to us such freaks as the Unabomber and Oklahoma City bombers. The media’s tales tend to make one imagine that living off the grid means shotguns, no TV, no Internet, and maybe even no hot water.

Living off the grid does not require this level of living without modern comforts.

My friends Dan and Elaina have a truly inspirational life. The have built for themselves a home that has all the modern amenities – Satellite TV and Internet, a sauna, a dishwasher, washer and dryer units – without having a significant footprint.When the weather cooperates, they can responsibly use all their modern amenities without needing anything other than propane for the hot water.

The word “responsibly” is the key. They actually put their whole house to sleep at night, shutting off all electricity (they have battery powered alarm clocks). It is really quite shocking how much power is pulled by the standard DVD player while it’s sitting in standby. By turning everything off, they reduce their load of their house’s batteries, and reduce their load on the world in some ways. The only negative is the 12:00 blinking on everything that has a clock. But is that such a terrible thing to face? They are also careful about how they use electricity when their house is awake. I was scolded for leaving my laptop plugged in and running on the counter while my iPhone charged. “Running your laptop is not the responsible way to charge your phone,” I was reminded. And when the battery is charged and the machine is not in use, it should not be plugged in. The same goes for everything that might sit on a charger all day. One particular pager was found to pull 30 Watts fully charged when it sat silent in its base. Unplug; that was my lesson for the weekend.

Living off the grid isn’t entirely about power consumption however. It is also an attitude toward how we eat and live. While we’ve all heard about the concept of a carbon footprint (and I don’t think it’s possible for me to atone for all my sins of flight), carbon isn’t the only issue in environmental abuse. Elaina introduced me to the concept of a chemical footprint. Beyond trying to balance how much carbon we put into the atmosphere through emissions and put into the land through plants and other sequestering methods, we also have to consider the metals and toxins we give and take with the environment.

Our planet has a certain ability to break down toxins into harmless forms and to replenish certain chemicals. While we don’t generally think of it, somewhere in the soil oil is starting to be made to someday supply our descendents. Salts are being formed to replace the salt we mine. The Earth continues to work as its own little chemical factory. In considering how we impact the efficiency of this planetary processing plant, the questions to ask are twofold: Does humanity remove stuff from the planet faster than the planet can create it? Do we create toxins faster than the Earth can absorb them? As a species, the answers are hard ones to face. We are using oil faster than the planet is producing it; we will eventually run out (and we’re already running out of the easy to access supply). We are even running out of some forms of fish faster than the oceans are producing new ones! And toxins, well, while bleach readily breaks down in the Sun, the same is not true of pesticides and the drugs we add into the water systems through our sewage.

In taking stock of our individual lives, we need to ask if we as individuals are consuming in a way that reduces our chemical footprint and maybe even makes up for the impact of our neighbors. This way of thinking gave me an entirely new perspective on organic eating. I decided long ago that a few more chemicals in my diet aren’t going to affect my health any worse than the chemicals and radiation I encounter working in physics and astronomy facilities. This means that I tend to take the cheap option and just buy the non-organic carrots and apples. What I hadn’t thought about was the environmental impact my cheap food was having on the planet. When I decide I’m not worried about consuming pesticides (given what I inhale passing chemistry labs), I’m also deciding that I’m okay with harming the health of the critters living in the soil of the fields that produce my food, and the workers working in those fields. Organic food isn’t just about my health; it’s about the health of the food chain. (Image: Blue berries we picked and later canned, a Zucchini from the garden, and the wine we drank while canning).

With food prices going up though, taking the organic option at the local grocer isn’t always in my paycheck’s best interest. And here is where my friends’ gardening habits help them out. They have managed to move most of their grocery needs off the grid. And it doesn’t take a lot of acres. For instance, they have chickens. Only one of them is old enough to lay eggs, and they have learned that one chicken lays enough eggs to keep a family of 4 in eggs. Their one egg laying chicken is a family pet, and she was quite happy to follow me around on long walks. By having more than one chicken (and by knowing the local butcher), they can guarantee themselves a steady supply of eggs and an occasional supply of meat (this is what happens to chickens that opt to actually be roosters). They also have both a vegetable garden and an herb garden, both small enough that together they add up to maybe 30 by 30 feet. I know that I could grow everything they are growing in the flowerbeds of our half-acre lot if I wanted too. (Image credit: My husband enjoying the view while the chicken followed me around)

Admittedly, they spend a lot of time gardening. That said, I spend almost no time gardening and I think I can offer hope for the lazy person trying to be kind to the planet. My much smaller garden is generally ignored. It has been weeded once all season, and watered never. While my green beans failed miserably, I suspect my husband and I won’t need to buy herbs, tomatoes, peppers, or any of the things necessary for salad until November (and if I get around to canning, we won’t need to buy salsa or apple sauce all year). I do not have a green thumb. I do not have much/any free time. But I do have a small garden (planted all in one day) that gives me the vegetables I use most when I (or more likely my husband) cook, a few berry vines and grape vines because they are prettier than fences, and an apple tree that came with the house and terrifies me with the number of apples it is planning to produce this year. These plants and their food represent an investment of about $100 and two Saturdays of time, and a savings of gas (no shipping the food to the grocery or bringing it home from the grocery), chemicals (no pesticides or chemical fertilizers), and waste (no packaging). (Image: Garden Spider I saw while picking blue berries for pancakes.)

And one of the side effects of being careful about power and food and waste is that you notice the world around you with a new set of eyes.

The part of this trip that made it a vacation was the part that was spent wondering the woods. They have umpteen wild blue berry, raspberry, and black berry plants covering probably 30% of their property. We hiked, we grazed, we grazed, we hiked. The chicken followed. To quote Elaina, “I don’t think there is a free radical left in my body.” We ate just that many berries (even the wine was from past years berry production).

And, while off the grid, in the middle of the White Mountains, surrounded by berries, chickens, and friends, I still had internet.

Graduate school is a hazing ritual, designed to make sure you really truly want to be allowed through the gates into the Ivory Tower. Those who don’t want it hard enough, generally can’t make it through the gauntlet of tests, homework sets, research walls and periodic failures of weather, equipment, software, satellites, and sometimes all of the above. (I experienced all of the above.)

Nonetheless, there are certain things I deeply miss. Today for some reason, I have both journal clubs and observing on my mind. These are two things I never really realized would go away to the degree that they have, and I feel like an entire part of my life was amputated when I wasn’t watching.

As a graduate student I spent obscene amounts of time at McDonald Observatory logging night after night on the 30″, 107″, and 82″ telescopes. My first observing season I logged 45 nights in 3 months, and that trend pretty much continued across the years. Alone in the dark, on the top of a mountain, I’d blare CDs (this was a pre-iPod universe), work on problem sets, abuse the printer to print journal articles, and sometimes sneak off to the library to read conference proceedings entirely unrelated to my research. One run for reasons I can’t explain other than explosions are cool, I read an entire conference proceedings on cataclysmic variables just cause. Alone in the night, I could get through my emails while the world slept. I could monitor the sky, the seeing, and my stars as I chewed through ideas, and projects, and silly little messages from friends. I could switch filters and switch fields as I filed away papers for future consideration and wrote software to cull through my photometry for clusters. There was something magical about living out of step with time. The people who occupied my work-a-day world couldn’t reach me at 1am with their business hour bothers, and I could catch-up and breath without distraction.

I am a night person at heart. Left alone my schedule rotates around to a 3am dinner and 5am bedtime. I love the sun and love to be outdoors, but the night is my natural habitat. I have been lucky enough to spend most of my career teaching night classes, but a married life means a certain amount of conforming to my husbands 9 to 5 schedule. New projects with friends in the EU and UK have rotated me even further away from my default mode, with my eyes now popping open at 6am as my mind tells me it’s 1pm in Germany. I am a professional, and my life is defined by my connections, my collaborations, and my ability to communicate in real time on issues we are all trying to solve together. No longer can I live the asynchronous life of a graduate student observer working on my solitary corner of my solitary project. I now must be the responsible professor and project manager – I must be the one creating the business hour bothers, some of which may not be able to wait.

As someone who chose to work at a university without an observatory I knew that those long nights on the mountain were something I was in a way putting away with my childhood toys. While I would like to think I was an excellent telescope operator, I know I was a cloud charmer. The vagaries of the weather wore on me, and after my final 22-night run with just 4 nights of sky… I was ready for data mining.

What I hadn’t realized in my return to academia was how little time life as an academic would leave me to just learn. As a graduate student, I remember being aware that the journal clubs were only occupied by postdocs and graduate students. Our advisor (the faculty member who said to us – go off and form a journal club!) would ask us for summaries of what we learned. I hadn’t realized this was his way of identifying cool new papers rather then his way of checking up on us. I remember noticing that the seminars on various sub-fields (stars, galaxies, planets…) were often empty of faculty, with everyone only showing up for the weekly out of town colloquium speakers. What I hadn’t realized was why. Given all the stupid pieces of paperwork – all the forms, and grants, and reports; given all the emails from colleagues and students, the university and public beyond the university; given all the distracters that demand attention, there is very little time left for me to just learn, and I suspect many of them felt the same way as they focused only on their subfields (causing us students to get angry in class when we knew a new result that wasn’t mentioned in lecture). Time is now the most valuable thing I have, and as much as I may want to spend it on something I don’t need to know, there are weeks I can’t justify the luxury of sitting in on a seminar in my physics department on thin films in photonic systems. While lasers are cool, the time it takes for me to learn the language of photonics is time I can’t spend trying to become current (I don’t think anyone ever really is current) in my own subfields of astronomy.

As a researcher, I have to accomplish all the things I did as a graduate student, and I also have to do all the stupid paperwork, and serve on committees, and participate in telecoms. I like working with people, and most days it’s fun to find new ways to transform my middle of the night scientific “I wonder…” questions into science projects, but…

But I miss the freedom to spend 5 hours a week in seminars if I feel like it. And I miss the freedom to be a vampire. I’d been warned it would all go away with graduation. I just had never believed my advisors. They were right. I was wrong.

Is this the academic equivalent of becoming my father?

I wouldn’t change anything (accept maybe the weather on some of those observing runs and the satellite that exploded), but I can still wish for a week alone on the mountain, and a few hours a week less paperwork that I can spend sitting in on a journal club…

This isn’t to say I don’t like reading paper books. Back when I had a subway commute (which I actually miss for many reasons), I’d chew through a couple books a month. Now, I don’t have those random minutes for paper books except when I fly (or ride the subway in London). What I have instead is a lot of time for audio books. While I weed / plant / otherwise mutate our yard to fit my whims, I am generally bored. I enjoy the physical labor and the outcomes, but while I work outside my brain drifts off in impatient circles, as it contemplates all the desk tasks I should be doing instead of being out in the sun. The best way I know to silence these “To Do” list daemons is to stuff my head first with podcasts, and then with Audio books. Faced with something interesting to pay attention to, the voices in my head generally settle in to voyage with characters of fiction across lands of fantasy.

The thing is, there are those among us who view listening to audio books as somehow less then actually reading. I know professors who don’t approve of any but the visually impaired listening to books. I know people who scoff at the dyslexic lawyer as being less educated because he listened to his law books. I don’t understand this. If you hear every single word – if you listen to an unabridged book – aren’t you receiving all the same content? The only thing that is different is that you don’t create all the characters voices for yourself – the narrator determines the voices for you. But is that such a tragic loss? Aren’t there times when I can gain from the nuanced voice an artistry of rhythm that I might miss if I read quickly to myself? It is a different experience, and there are books that I need to read on paper so I can mark my thoughts, but is different always bad?

Listening to books has always been a guilty pleasure for me. As a small child, my grandmother recorded a bunch of books on audio cassettes for me and I’d listen to them and other books on tape as I lay in bed looking at my nightlight shaped as a dancer. As an older child, when my family went on road trips my dad would put audio books in the car’s tape player and we’d make our way across America while listening to the “Day of the Triffid,” “The Adventures of Sherlock Holms,” and various Star Trek books on tape. As an adult, I felt confident trekking across the country alone by car because I new I had company; The BBC’s audio rendition of “Lord of the Rings” could get me from Austin to Albuquerque and almost back again, and Toni Morrison and Anne Rice both (in very different ways) called shot gun as I went back and forth from McDonald Observatory. I made it through all of Steve King’s Dark Tower series while packing to move to Illinois, and I tried not to cry listening to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close while I walked the beach in Hawaii last year, alone except for my words and the sky. Books flavor the places I listen to them – Shalimar the Clown helped me create a brick patio, and Eragorn‘s magic sustained me as I hung insulation in the attic. I wouldn’t have been able to experience these books if I hadn’t been able to listen to them while my body experienced and did other things. Audio liberated me to “read” in a way I wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

And I wish I understood better the bigotry against “reading” audio books.

For now though, let me say, when I advertise Audible.com on Astronomy Cast, I’m advertising a company I’ve had a membership with (with a couple no-spare-cash induced breaks) for about 4 years, and PodioBooks has excellent content that in some cases can’t be found anywhere else. Next time you are out of podcasts and you have a day of brainless tasks ahead of you, take a book out into the yard to play.

• Today I did an interview with the undead. Specifically with Chuck and Kreg of Technorama, which, despite the rumors, is not actually dead. I’m not sure when the show will air, but I’ll let you know!
• May 31 I’ll be at AstroZone in St Louis, and I am planning to take live questions in person and over the internet via uStream
• There will be a New Media meet during the AAS/ASP conference June 1-5. If you are a podcaster and will be there, let me know so I can get you on the “Who you can meet?” announcement. If you are interested in coming, keep an ear out for more information!
• June 6, I will sleep a-l-l day.

And now onto the off topic.

When I started keeping this blog, my personal and for friends blog died. I only have so many hours, and something had to go. This means that when I have a day that really just needs to be shared, I generally keep it to myself. That said, today I decided I’m going to inflict some off topic silliness on you because, well, this is my blog.

My husband and I live in irony. While this is not as fun as living in sin, it is perhaps more amusing. Today was an ironic day, and not in the Alanis Morissette pathetic kind of way. It was actually ironic.

For instance, we have (possibly had) a very dumb snake living in our yard. A couple weeks ago I was dismantling a poorly re-constructed a fire pit to stabilize it and found this snake between two of the stones where it was apparently waiting to be set on fire. I picked the disgruntled thing up and re-homed it to the much safer wooded area in our backyard. Today, I was picking up a random pile of wood that didn’t quite get made into a fence and found a same size, same breed, (possibly actually the same) snake apparently waiting to get made into a fence. I picked it up again, walked it over to the same wooded, should be much safer, area, and watched it slither off. Later today my dog was acting the same way she acts when she is hunting turtles in a pond, only she was in the underbrush that shouldn’t have turtles. I assumed she was hunting moles, but when she finally pounced and picked something up it was a snake, the same size and breed as the one I had twice so carefully rescued and put somewhere “safer”. While it had no obvious injuries, it didn’t exactly slither off with the same verve as earlier in the day when I put it down deeper in the wooded area.

Not to be out done by reptiles, the inanimate objects in my yard decided to be ironic as well. Specifically the bricks. The house we bought almost two years ago had been neglected for about 5 years, and the former flower beds had been completely overrun with ivy (poison ivy in many cases!). As part of my mission to systematically destroy ivy, I have been outlining all our gardens with edging bricks (all the better to contain bark mulch). Having finally finished edging everything this morning, I started to actually put in a garden (peppers, tomatoes, cukes – beginner plants). Image my horror when I found a grid of bricks about 5 inches below the surface from where some prior owner had built a garden in a similar but not identical place. I removed an entire buried “L” of bricks that ran parallel to where I’d put the garden’s side and front edges. Since everything has already been edged, I now have this pile of ironic bricks. Perhaps if I leave them in place, and if the snake lives, the snake will move into the pile of bricks…

Tomorrow I will work on IYA projects from my screen porch while admiring my ironic yard.

Tomorrow morning, the first Monday morning of summer class-break, marks the beginning of grant reporting and seeking season, and research season. Armed with high-end processors we’ll be hunting publications and public funding. I have two grants to write my summary reports for, a grant and a contract that I need to complete the work on, and a bunch of funding that I need to seek in between my pursuits of galaxies and variable stars.

Summer Break? Nope. But… The research part of this is play. As I’ve mentioned before, I do two different areas of science research: Galaxy Evolution in clusters using SDSS, and RR Lyrae stars. Recently I had someone ask why I worked on something as non-sexy as RR Lyrae stars. I responded that they are like the ultimate game of suduko. There is, for each star over a short period of time, only one solution, and that solution can require a several different pulsations to be combined in just one very specific way. Sorting out the modes and their timing is to me a puzzle that is just plain fun. Now, for the next few months at least, part of what I get to do instead of grading, is solve the puzzles RR Lyrae stars want to give me.

So, tonight, having found there is nothing interesting (to me) in arXiv, and not feeling like trolling any farther for a good story to blog about, I’m going to line up my journal articles, and data sets simply say tomorrow is the first day of my summer recess research period. Tomorrow and Thursday I meet with different students to chew through different Astronomy Education Research projects on new media, and hopefully chew through outlines of journal articles. Tuesday and Wednesday I’m working on a grant, IYA, and galaxy research, and Friday will be RR Lyraes and IYA again. I’ve pulled out the books and journal articles I had at home, filled a milk crate, and everything is ready to go into campus with me tomorrow.

Let it begin. Data, lay it on me – let me see what you’ve got.

Sadly, there are no stars we preceive as green.

For the next year, I’m going to try an experiment. I love teaching, I love creating New Media, and I research. I can’t do any of these three things well if I try and pretend to do one full time and the other two part-time. Thus, to enable myself to do what I love in the proportions that I love them, I’m going to not teach at all this summer, and starting in the fall, I’m going to be part-time faculty at SIUE.

What exactly does that mean, and why are the changes needed? Well, this semester I taught 4 hours of physics lecture (60 students), 3 hours of astronomy lecture (36 students), and 6 hours of lab. I only had a grader for lab. This meant that I spent a little over 40 hours per week preparing to teach, answering student questions during office hours, teaching, grading, and preparing assignments. In addition to teaching for SIUE, I’ve also been working with students from SAO. I love my students, but when I see them more waking-hours each week then I see my husband, I am teaching too much. On top of that teaching load, I’ve been working on Astronomy Cast, this little blog, and I’ve occasionally been writing for Sky and Telescope.

As part of my required university paperwork, I had to add up how much time I spend each week on different tasks. When faced with that form and a painfully honest look at my life, I realized I was spending 80+ hours a week doing work. The teaching and occasional writing, I did for my paycheck, and everything else I did because I loved it. After talking with my software engineer of a husband for a while, we decided to I should take a risk and see if I could find ways to bring in income blogging and podcasting. I’ll still keep working with SAO, and I’ll be teaching one 4-credit lecture class and team teaching another in the fall at SIUE. Teaching just won’t be as all-consuming as it was this year. Going part time is a risk, but is one that I’m hoping will prove worthwhile.

This is a one year experiment that has me planning to take this blog daily, and has me looking for grants, looking for sponsors, and has me looking to the Bad Astronomer, Phil Plait as proof that sometimes this experiment can have a positive outcome. We’ll see what happens. I’m grateful to those of you who have been here since the beginning, and I’m hoping that in the next few days and weeks I’ll convince you to tell all your friends about this site and all that it will have to offer.

Tomorrow I hop on a plane to Boston. On the plane I will grade exams, read Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson and work on some writing. Then for the weekend, I get to work hard with people I respect to shape the future of an organization I respect. While in Boston, I might be evil and spend too much money getting my hair dyed by someone I trust. And then Monday, I fly home, race to class, and it all starts over again.

The debris of this journey will most likely be less rich then the last. I’ll probably have some paperwork and dead pens, but nothing exciting. Perhaps, if I get to go to AAS in Hawaii this summer, I’ll have another empty bag sitting beside another fascinating pile of detritus.

On the research front, I have a date with AH Leo. This stubborn little RR Lyrae star has been refusing to reveal all the downbeats of its complex rhythms for several years. This star pulsates in a complex combination of radial and non-radial pulsations that are discussed in an article I wrote last year. Imagine a song with a driving 2/2 bass drum – Thump thump, Thump thump – that has layered on top of it a complex longer percussion lines – ratta tat tat ratta tatta tat tat ratta ta ta … . AH Leo is dancing to that complex beat, revealing its baseline easily, year after year, but never quite letting me see how that top line repeats.

Common wisdom says, “If at first you don’t succeed, find a bigger hammer.” Last year I went out a found the biggest variable star hammer I know of and hit AH Leo with it. The hammer was the AAVSO and its hordes of highly knowledgeable and skilled amateur astronomers. Last April a call went out – catch AH Leo’s light, record its every change. From across the globe amateur astronomers emerged armed with telescopes and CCDs, and (as weather, spouses, and other obligations allowed) they let no photon go unobserved. Over 4000 data points later, I have the data needed to get at the background oscillations of AH Leo, and thanks to the hard work of Marek Kozabul at Clay Center Observatory, I’m getting one final year’s data to confirm what is going on.

This brings us to the writing part of this entry. Writing blogs is a pleasure. Writing research papers and grants is not. On my ‘Spring Break to do list’ is the need to start writing up AH Leo, and also to start writing up grants for some side projects. To try and mediate the pain I will probably be writing at least one blog entry on tools for both research and grant finding/writing that minimize the pain.

And in the midst of my professional astronomer research and writing, I’m going to work on some recording. I want to get some of my talks turned into enhanced podcasts that I will post on this site. I also have a neat collaboration in the works between Astronomy Cast and an entity that has been a long time promoter of public astronomy education that I can’t wait to reveal. Part of what makes astronomy exciting to me is being able to communicate not just my research (which in the grand scheme of things isn’t the most exciting of stuff) as well as the research of the entire community to the public. My personal excitement about astronomy is fed by the excitement of others. I’m am driven by every letter from a reader/listener and every student who asks a question just out of curiosity. Their desire to know more, makes me want to find more answers and find better ways to communicate those answers.

The other day I was asked why I focus so much on astronomy education research, and I have to admit that I don’t see podcasting and astronomy education research as the same thing. Yes, people do learn about astronomy from Astronomy Cast. But, I also learn about middle-east politics from Time, and about home repairs from “This Old House.” Are people who write for Time doing research how to most effectively teach middle-east politics so people retain what they learn? Are the folks at “This Old House” doing research on best practices in evaluating what people learn about home repair? Maybe, but I’m betting their primary focus is on communicating content and finding the most effective ways to catch and keep their non-captive audiences. Astronomy Cast does educate. Fraser and I rely on the research others have done in using technology to communicate and how to most effectively convey astronomy. We are a content source, and if you are going to place us in a bin, I suspect that our bin would also contain Sky and Telescope, Bad Asttonomy, the Cosmos series, and a whole lot of popular astronomy content. Astronomy text books and astronomy classes, which all have activities for learners and evaluation components to test learning are in a different bin. I have the utmost respect for people doing astronomy education research, and it is because of that respect that I must say I am an astronomy educator, variable star researcher and astronomy communicator/journalist, but not an astronomy education researcher.

Now, if you want to ask me why I spend so much time popularizing astronomy through podcasting and writing, that I can answer. I do it because astronomy inspires people to question, to think, and to want to learn more about science. I want to live in an inspired, scientifically knowledgeable, and questioning society. Through popularizing astronomy I can help to build that future society I want to live in. Astronomy is a gateway drug to wanting to learn science, and I am a dealer standing on a digital street corner peddling cosmology, stellar evolution and planetary science. My little pages of content are free, but if you find yourself coming back, I just might start asking you to donate. Come learn. Go out and tell all your friends. Here, let me give you some links for you little siblings, and don’t forget – the more people who come and learn, the more I will be inspired to give.