I’m in the last day of a meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico and will be heading back to my new home in Illinois tonight. Sadly, that means I’ll miss the annular eclipse that is about to happen, but I’ll be sure to make plans for the 2017 total eclipse that will be visible across the United States.
If you need a few minutes to space out, literally, check out the winners of the 2012 Earth and Sky Photo Contest that was held for Global Astronomy Month over at The World at Night.
Enjoy!
Categories: astronomy · science
Tagged: astronomy, earth, pictures, pretty, space
Few days… Few weeks. Okay, I’m back. I just moved to the Midwest to start my new job as a post-doc working with CosmoQuest as informal education lead. Woo hoo! My apartment is only partly unpacked, my office just getting set up, the university doesn’t even have me in the system yet, but I’ve officially started! In fact, I’m at a NASA Education and Public Outreach retreat in New Mexico, getting to know my new colleagues.
I really look forward to getting back to blogging. There is a post coming together over at Skepchick about the formation of the Moon, and I’ve said my “Hello, world!” over at CosmoQuest. I’ve finally poked my head back into the Weekly Space Hangout and will be blogging over at Discovery really soon. Speaking of writing, once I’ve finished my corrections, I’ve decided to actually share the final version of my Ph.D dissertations with you all because, well, why not. Science should be open. My committee even encouraged me to write a blog-friendly version of my introduction, so look forward to that as well.
I’d really like to encourage anyone who can get to St. Louis over Memorial Day weekend to check out the College of Curiosity, a new kind of interactive skeptic and science event over at the City Museum. That place is ridiculously awesome all on its own, and you’ll also get to interact with a fun lineup of speakers who will guide you through weird things like math magic and alien life. I hope to see you there!
It’s really, really good to be done. But as the Cult of Done reminds us, Done is just the engine of More.
Categories: general · outreach · science · skeptic
Tagged: blog, events, job, travel
In case you didn’t already hear… I passed.
Back to blogging SOON! (For real. I promise. Like give me another day or so…)
Categories: general
Tagged: imadoctornow
(Updated to fix time zone.)
Categories: general
Ever wanted to drop in on a bunch of space nerds discussing the top stories of the week? Of course you do. You are reading this blog.
All of the episodes are now also archived on CosmoQuest, where you can watch the show live, every Thursday at 18 UTC. Find your timezone for next week here!
Also, I’ve been dumping some personal videos that I’ve dug up onto YouTube. Here is a panorama of the PAPER-South Africa site from June 2011:
There’s also my skydiving video that was on VHS (thank you, Tim, for converting it!) and some “Occupy” and related protest footage from recent travels. I figured, why not share the bits.
So… just as I was saying how I need to spew forth words into a thesis by April… I’ve also joined SkepChick as a new blogger! I figure, if I just keep writing and writing and writing in different places, something good will come out. Right?
In any case, I’m honored to join such a creative, fun, smart, and nerdy group. My first two posts focus on exoplanets and aliens, as I get right into my favorite topics.
Also, I finally posted a blog again on Discovery, this time about the very cool APOGEE project that has had its first observations.
And in one more announcement… the Weekly Space Hangout now has a home on CosmoQuest! Thanks to Pamela Gay’s impressive coding-fu, you can now go to one place for the hangout, live Astronomy Cast recordings, Questions with the Bad Astronomer, live virtual star parties, and whatever other astronomical goodness we can stream into your eyeholes.
Citizen science online is catching on these days. Not just for your screensaver anymore, these projects let you get your hands dirty, metaphorically speaking. You can classify galaxies or fold proteins.
I am really happy to share this project which is now in beta and building a community for astronomical research: CosmoQuest.
Categories: astronomy · education · outreach · science
Tagged: citizen science, cosmoquest
Aaaannnnddd… back. In Charlottesville. The last week and a half saw me in two of the most fun cities I know and at two different conferences presenting my thesis work and all kinds of other professional stuff. Crazy.
You can get a nice sense of the week’s astronomy and space stories by watching the weekly astronomy video chat:
Thanks to Google+ master of the universe, Fraser Cain, we’re doing a live chat about astronomy every Thursday at 10amPT/1pm ET (that’s 18 UTC; check here for your local time.) You can ask questions in the chat during the event or watch the recorded video after it’s done. Last week, I called in from the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, and was graced with the presence of such stellar people as Pamela Gay, Phil Plait, Jon Voisey, Nancy Atkinson, Alan Boyle, Emily Lakdawalla, and Ian O’Neill.
Greetings from Boulder! I’m at the National Radio Sciences Meeting of URSI, listening to lots of talks on radio astronomy and geosciences, as well as madly finishing my own talk which I gave yesterday.
I just had to share this cool website that was in one of the talks in the education section of the radio astronomy session. The Long Wavelength Array is a telescope in New Mexico that is being developed to study very low frequency radio waves from the cosmos, just a bit lower in frequency than the PAPER project that I work on. They are at a point where they can image the entire sky every few minutes seconds*, and they are making these images available in real time. Check out what the sky looks like at a few 10s of megahertz right now at LWA TV.
Here is the sky at the time of this draft:
(more…)
Categories: astronomy
Tagged: radio telescopes
I’m a brand new post-doc in astronomy working as part of the CosmoQuest team. My thesis focused on radio astronomy instrumentation. That means, I got to build cool telescopes that will open up new frontiers in the universe. I also love to teach, both in a classroom setting and informally. I'm happy to talk about the universe with anyone who will listen, and I am skeptically curious about all things.
