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Archive for March, 2010

Telescopes from Space!

Posted in astronauts, astronomy, carnival, nrao, space on March 31, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Soichi Noguchi, an astronaut currently living aboard the International Space Station as part of Expedition 23, loves sending back gorgeous pictures of the Earth and Moon via his Twitter feed, astro_soichi. This morning, I woke up to a lovely picture of the Atacama Desert, complete with a from-orbit view of the ALMA OSF: Click a [...]

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AstroJargon of the Week: HI

Posted in astronomy, jargon, nrao on March 27, 2010 | 1 Comment »

For this week’s (late) AstroJargon, I’d like to point out a bit of jargon I used in my Ada Lovelace post the other day. I talked all about HI (the letter “H” and the Roman numeral one) studies, and before posting, I quickly inserted “neutral hydrogen” as a definition. But why is that important anyway? [...]

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Radio Stars!

Posted in personal, podcasts on March 24, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

My buddy and officemate George is going to be on Public Universe at Blog Talk Radio tomorrow morning at 10am EDT. The show is really fun, and they ask some great science questions, so check it out! They have a recording of my chat with them from last week as well, which was a big [...]

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Nan Dieter Conklin: Two Paths to Heaven’s Gate

Posted in astronomy, lovelace, science, women on March 24, 2010 | 6 Comments »

This year, for Ada Lovelace Day, I’d like to celebrate women in technology and science by celebrating the life of another early pioneer of radio astronomy: Nan Dieter Conklin. (If you haven’t, check out last year’s post on Ruby Payne-Scott!) A couple of years ago, I picked up Nan’s memoirs, “Two Paths to Heaven’s Gate” [...]

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Spacey Carnival and the Ladies of Science

Posted in blogs, carnival, space on March 23, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

This week’s carnival, number 146, is hosted by Simostronomy! I was particularly entertained by the submission from Alice’s AstroInfo, where she compares her own planetarium repair experiences to the last Hubble servicing mission. At the time of the STS-125 mission, I was in Green Bank climbing around on our antenna groundscreens again, doing repair work, [...]

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My Very First Teaching Gig!

Posted in astronomy, teaching on March 17, 2010 | 3 Comments »

Okay, I am pretty darn excited. I get to teach my very first class ever this summer! Grad students don’t normally teach astronomy classes at the University of Virginia except during the summer semesters. The classes are a little over two hours a day, five days a week! The topic? Life Beyond Earth. *SQUEE!* Professors [...]

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AstroJargon of the Week: Parsec

Posted in astronomy, carnival, jargon, space on March 15, 2010 | 9 Comments »

This week I thought I’d scale back from such a rich topic as AGN and tell you a little bit about the parsec. (In this case, I do not mean the podcast awards!) A parsec is a measure of distance. But, you are thinking, Nicole, don’t you astronomers already use the light year as a [...]

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And the winner is… SPACE!

Posted in astronomy, carnival, picture, space on March 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

The ever-fabulous Ian O’Neill hosts this week’s Carnival of Space #144. There are lots of great astronomical highlights from this week, but I’m particularly in love with this gorgeous multi-wavelength image of NGC 1068: via Chandra, Hubble, and the Very Large Array Check it all out at Discovery News this week!

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What’s the message?

Posted in education, museum, outreach, science on March 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

This past weekend, I batted my eyelashes at Tim to go to the Hayden Planetarium with me once I discovered it was a few blocks away from a wedding we were attending. We took all of Saturday afternoon to catch the latest planetarium show and browse the rest of the American Museum of Natural History. [...]

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AstroJargon of the Week – AGN

Posted in AGN, astronomy, black holes, jargon, science on March 7, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Jeffrey Bennett, astronomer and author, once told us that a typical astronomy textbook has about as many vocabulary words as a typical foreign language textbook. So, in addition to teaching physical and astronomical concepts, we’re teaching a whole new language! Jargon is incredibly useful for making detailed communication within a specific field efficient and convenient, [...]

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