Archive of Writings
Additional articles can be found on EVSN.tv.
AAS, editorial in time ownership
Yesterday I took several pages of notes on the Kepler results (Kepler 10b in particular) and once I have time to chew through those notes I'm going to put together a longer blog post. One thing that occurred to me earlier today is that I'm just not able to write at...
AAS Day 1: Cassini & the Saturnian Rings
Cassini entered orbit around Saturn in 2004 after a roughly 7 year journey through the solar system. For 5.5 years it has weaved through the Saturn system, in an orbit that has carried it near the moons and over the plane of the disk. Through all of its imaging it has...
Lunar overload
I've spent my morning sitting in talks at the EPSC meeting (location in attached image) on new lunar results from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. At this stage, my brain is full (does that make my loony?) so I think it's time to blog it all out. (sadly, not...
Planets in Rome
Somewhere in the past year I found myself associated with the Moon. More specifically, through my work with Moon Zoo (and the forthcoming Mercury Zoo), I've become part of the planetary sciences education and public outreach community. This has opened a lot of...
There be Dragons (& Voorwerps)
It's 2 weeks to Dragon*Con and I'm going a bit insane. As I mentioned in my last post, a group of us are getting ready to launch a comic book at Dragon*Con. As I've twittered, there is a fundraiser for cancer research the night before Dragon*Con. What I haven't...
A Voorwerpish Comic
Sometimes, as an astronomer, I get to do some really weird stuff. This summer is one of those times. I actually, thanks to project PI (i.e. lead) Bill Keel, got an opportunity to help produce a comic book telling the story of how a Dutch school teacher found the light...
Separation between Scientific Truth & Belief
UPDATE: People have been making a lot of assumptions about things that didn't actually happen. I'm adding asterisk (*) places people have made assumptions and clarifying at the end. I'd like to start this blog post by saying just one simple thing I know to be true: I...
A scientific mind is a terrible thing to waste
I haven't been doing a lot of writing lately. I generally just make the excuses, "I've been busy" or say "I don't make money on my blog and need to focus on paid jobs." These are just excuses though. I can always find time to write. The truth is, I just can't find it...
Cape Town – You need to experience it
I think I need to change the theme of this blog from astronomy and academics to astronomy, academics and travel. I have to admit, somewhere in the past couple months I went from traveling a lot to traveling too much. I have acquired opinions about the wheels on...
Emerging Fields: Astronomy Communications and Education
When I started graduate school, I was given the impression that astronomy consisted of two broad formats (observational and theoretical) and addressed a set of specific subtopics (planets, stars, intersteller media, galaxies/cosmology). In this paradigm, people who...