And the cover art was designed by Space Tweep Society founder, Jen Scheer!

Other space news… Carnival of Space #148 is up at Celestial Spider!

A few people got this shot, but George is sitting right next to me!

And there’s video of it as well. I haven’t seen an embeddable version yet, but click to see this one hosted on spaceweather.com, taken by 13-year-old Anna Herbst from California. The ripples were seen in the clouds as a result of a shockwave just after the craft went supersonic and as it hit “max-Q” or the point at which the pressure on the craft is at its maximum. (I didn’t keep track of the timing, but Nancy Atkinson of Universe Today did!)

Such a shockwave occurs when an object is moving through a medium faster than the speed of sound in that medium (the atmosphere, in this case). The speed of sound sets the limit of how fast information about the gas can travel within that gas in the atmosphere. Sharp discontinuities in temperature, pressure, and density can occur. We could “see” these discontinuities as it reached the cirrus clouds. For whatever reason, it appeared to bust up the cloud material that was creating the sundog.

Little SDO put on quite a show in its first few minutes as a spacecraft! I’ll be writing more on SDO science and our amazing TweetUp adventure, once I get some darn sleep…

I am finally recovered, mostly, from the big American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, DC, that occurred last week.  What a ride!

For me, the conference started off with a teaching workshop put on by the Center for Astronomy Education on interactive learning methods in “Astro 101.” As I start to sort through those notes, I’ll be able to write more about it. Suffice to say, it was wonderful to see that many interactive methods which were used in some of my favorite humanities classes are applicable to the large, lecture-hall-filling introductory astronomy classes.  Some of the exercises brought more questions out of me than they answered, but I have yet to even teach my first class… so time will tell.

The conference itself was just a whirlwind of activity. I made it to a number of the main talks, but very few of the small talks. I made it around to many, but not all, of the posters that I wanted to see.  A typical meeting has maybe a hundred posters each day, and maybe a dozen or so 5-minute talks going on at any one time.  You can’t do it all.  Walking around the poster session, I found myself having lengthy conversations with presenters or running into and having conversations with people on the floor at random. This is great for my research, for my education, and for networking, but absolutely terrible for keeping a schedule! But that is what made this conference great. Even at my own poster (the research one) I spent at least half an hour poring over the details with my collaborators, and we probably scared off at least one of the judges that was supposed to come by for the student competition. (Sorry!)

I also hardly slept. The conversations spilled out of the conference and around the dinner tables at nearby restaurants, then to the bars! I found myself out every night with such wonderful people, then had to drag my butt up to make the 8:30am talks. But who needs sleep when you are surrounded by so many great people?  I managed to work in some quality pub time with Phil Plait, a mini-reunion of 2004 Socorro summer students, a tweet-up with Pamela Gay and friends, a night of finishing the DSBK website while at the bar, and a particularly entertaining evening at the hotel bar with my friends and Neil deGrasse Tyson. And that was before the “real” party on Wednesday night which was, as the kids say, “off the hook.”

Check out my Flickr page for some visuals!

The Big Stories

Some of the big topics were already covered quite well by the science news sites and blogs, so I’ll do a quick roundup here before I delve into my own notes later.

Kepler

The Kepler mission made a splash with its first science results.  With just a few weeks of preliminary data, the team has discovered 5 exoplanets, studied variable stars, detected weird planet-sized hot objects, and identified many candidate planets. Read up with Universe Today, Star Stryder, and Astroengine.

Magellanic Clouds

The Spitzer Space Telescope released a gorgeous image of starbirth in the Small Magellanic Cloud, as covered by Bad Astronomy. UVa’s David Nidever and Steve Majewski used the Green Bank Telescope to show that the streams of gas being pulled away from the Magellanic Clouds by the Milky Way are longer than was previously thought. Galactic cannibalism at it’s best can be found over at Universe Today.

Bolden’s NASA

NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden made a big splash with his talk, which I missed, but I was able to catch up via Twitter. I can’t comment since I wasn’t there, but Phil Plait and Pamela Gay give excellent summaries and reactions. (My first response to Bolden’s call to get children to look through telescopes would be, look over here!)

Gravity Waves

NANOGrav, a method for detecting gravitational waves by timing millisecond pulsars (MSPs), got some good press that was picked up by Astroengine. I love seeing this story, but I’m biased since a) it involves radio telescopes and b) I know a few of the team members and they are super brilliant people. Although this particular collaboration is relatively new, these people have been crunching away on pulsar timing for years now and have been perfecting their techniques, just waiting for a great chance such as Fermi and its ability to detect new MSPs.

The stories don’t end there…

And there was so much more! I’m sure the upcoming Carnival of Space will include a smorgasbord of new discoveries that were announced at the AAS, and I’ll be following up with my own notes on topics that didn’t quite make it to press. Til then… cheers! To honor…

Part of the 2004 Socorro Summer crowd, the coolest REU ever: Kirstin, Chun, me, Yancy, Kelley, and Ben.

So, I attended, no, experienced my very first Dragon*Con. It was on a scale of something that I have never seen before. Tens of thousands of freaks and geeks, many in costume, descended upon downtown Atlanta to laugh, squee, drink, and just be themselves (or whoever they want to be) for a while.

Crowd partying at the Marriott bar

Some classic superheroes, at least one with a new spin! Lots more pictures, including some of Tim and me in costume, are on Picasa and Facebook.

I actually spent a lot of my time at Skeptrack. I finally got to meet many wonderful people that I had only know of through their writing or podcasts or through Twitter.  We had SUCH a blast!  These intelligent, creative people are each in their own right a force of nature, so the congregation of them in one place was simply spectacular.  Conversations started early in the day with the first panels, and stretched well into the next AM.  I don’t think I can do justice to each and every person that I met there so I’ll just say, thank you! And a special thanks to Derek and Swoopy of Skepticality for all of us even being there.

The closing Skeptrack panel

I’ve come away with a lot of great ideas and inspiration for various things I’d like to write and do.  As usual, it will take time for any one to come to fruition in my “spare time” (hahaha).  But as a number of the panelists stressed at various points, each one of us can do something, even something little, to advance skeptical thinking in the culture around us.

Some other highlights from the Con:

The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast won the “Best Infotainment” Parsec Award! Congrats to the whole team who work tirelessly to put this project together, and each and every one of the contributors to the cast.

George Hrab accepted this little gem on behalf of the cast.

The world record attempt at the most people dancing “Thriller” was attempted! I was not present, but the video is fantastic.

The pre-Dragon*Con Star Party was a success! The event was sold out, and then some, while guests mingled, chatted, and honored the late Jeff Medkeff.  Kudos to Maria Walters and the Atlanta Skeptics for organizing (and driving us around, and just for everything!), Pamela Gay and Phil Plait for giving kick-ass talks to a tipsy, rowdy crowd, and the Bradley Observatory at Agnes Scott for hosting and for letting Pamela and I talk to their students during the day. Despite the clouds, we got some good views of the Moon and Jupiter.  I have to say, the Galileoscope is a really neat tool for introducing astronomy.  I would recommend a tripod, however, though sitting on the concrete in your new dress to balance it on the back of a chair is also perfectly acceptable. Except maybe to my dress.

Randomly walking past celebrities in the hallway and in the bathroom was so weird.  I did a double take for both Michael Trucco and Felicia Day.  I also got to enjoy Felicia Day’s Guild Q&A and a really fun BSG panel with Michael Hogan and Mary McDonnell.  So it wasn’t all Skeptrack all the time, I got out and geeked out a bit, too.

I got pissed with the FDO. Really. A lot of us did… I’m surprised the bar ever let us back. That was one of at least four* (maybe five if Geologic gets posted!) live podcasts I got to attend, the others being Skeptic Zone, SGU, and a hilarious, hilarious Amateur Scientist. And we finally got to hear Christian Walters on that latter podcast!  Special thanks to him for driving my ass around Atlanta and helping us find a hotel and for even getting me to come down there in the first place.

So, check out my pictures, and look forward to some new skeptical thoughts to come! If I met you and haven’t friended you on Facebook or Twitter yet, go ahead and say hi!

The flight home. Oh no, how did they find me! Oh, that’s how. Props to the BA for that recommendation.

*Ack, apologies. I can’t remember what was recorded for podcast and what wasn’t!

Dr. SETI is the nickname used by Dr. Paul Shuch, an engineer with years of experience in commercial, academic, and military pursuits.  An avid radio amateur, he served as the Executive Director of the SETI League, a non-profit organization that brings together amateur radio astronomers in the search for signals from extraterrestrial intelligence.  And let me tell you, if you thought amateur astronomers were awesomely smart and resourceful people, and they are, amateur radio astronomers are doubly so, with their understanding of radio engineering and creativity in designing their own projects.  I first met Dr. Shuch when he gave a performance at Lycoming College in my sophomore year, and I happily sang along to “Cosmic Carl” from the audience!  So, listening to Skeptics Mix Tape, I was transported back to that memory.

Dr. Shuch lived just outside of Willamsport, home to Lyco, so he stayed in touch with our department over the years.  In my senior year, we visited the “Very Small Array,” part of the SETI League’s efforts, at his home.  I loved the way that he could explain the instrumentation of the array, although this was four years ago now and I didn’t take good notes.  But I do have pictures!

Dr. Shuch, showing off the green and brown antennas. Why that color? Well the neighbors complained he was “spoiling the natural landscape.”

For the record, I think dishes are pretty.

Right after I graduated, Dr. Shuch joined the faculty at Lyco for a year to help out the understaffed physics and astronomy department. Although I’m sad that I missed his teaching there, I’m sure that his work with our Small Radio Telescope was fun and educational!

So, the song itself makes me *squee* because of my geeky love of Carl Sagan.  First of all, I saw “Contact” in theatres when I was 13, which is about the time I decided I wanted to be an astronomer.  I was fascinated with the character of Ellie and her drive to pursue her life’s work.  Later, I started working in radio astronomy in Socorro, New Mexico, near the Very Large Array (which is not actually an awful waste of space). I got to geek out by reenacting various scenes in the movie with my REU* compatriots, as my standard avatar shows.  And yes, we even came up with a “Contact” drinking game. I now own the book version of Contact, which is also fantastic, and “Cosmos” on DVD, which is totally inspiring.  But Carl Sagan also had a big impact on my life when I read Demon-Haunted World just a few years ago. That book was really my introduction to skepticism as a world-view, not just something used in science and while watching infomercials.  So I owe much of my love of and interest in astronomy and skepticism to Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan through their creative works.

So to Carl… “billions and billions of cheers!”

* REU = Research Experience for Undergraduates.  If you are a science major, this is a GREAT way to spend a summer doing research, especially if you attend a small institution with limited resources.

Check out George Hrab’s “On Superstition” from the JREF blog. He has it so right. Catch him reading it at the end of the latest Geologic Podcast. Also, he’s playing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in CA in January. One of the few years that I’m not going to the meeting! Balls.

CVille Skeptics first MeetUp was awesome! Billions of thanks to Amanda for being a great organizer. I’m sure I need to comment on it further, but… ZZZZzzzzzz….

First, a clear look at the Green Bank Telescope from above:

You can see the support buildings around it, and the little mounds where the laser surface system was being designed, and the huge shadow that it casts, showing its profile. Wow.

So I scoot over to our project’s site, in a field dubbed “Galford Meadow” and I’m floored by what I see.

This doesn’t look like much to most, so here’s the brief tour. At the upper left of the image is a white circle, and that antenna is known as 85-2, or the second 85-ft antenna that was used in early interferometry experiments. Coming from that is a dirt “road” to the center of the field, and that ends at our electronics hut. It houses the receivers, power supplies, computers, and a special computer for interferometry, called a correlator. The hut is in the center of an imaginary circle, and on that circle is where we place our antennas. These antennas are 5ft x 5ft wire mesh screens, painted white, with white wire mesh flaps on each end at a 45-degree angle, and a metal sleeved dipole in the middle. They are cute little things, really, and I was shocked to see them in this satellite image. Only two were in the field at the time this was taken (late 2007) and you can see them at the 12 o’clock and 3 o’clock positions on the circle. PAPER can be seen from space! Right now, we have 16 of these antennas on that circle, monitoring the sky round the clock, and giving us a wealth of new data that we can use to image the sky at low frequencies and test our imaging algorithms. One of these days I will have to really write about PAPER, or you can wait for the April 2nd installment of the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast!

After showing this to my labmates, we scooted over to one of our other favorite radio telescopes, the Very Large Array. Zoomed out, you can see the tracks that make up the arms of the interferometer that extend out to 13km. But zoomed into the center of the array:

You can see pretty fine details, even the arms of the subreflectors above the dishes! Wow.

So go ahead, type in your favorite telescope and see if Google Maps has some cool views.

and the description underneath is hilarious!

Really, you work all week, on a Saturday you just need to enjoy the TETHYS GET OFF OF PANDORA GET OFF GET OFF TETHYS NO JANUS DON’T YOU GET INVOLVED TETHYS GET OFF GET GET little bit of relaxation.

Thanks, G!

The little one is the planet around the K7 star in the middle.

I haven’t taken time to read the paper yet, but there’s more good info at Bad Astronomy and Universe Today. As expected, it was taken in the infrared, where stars are slightly dimmer and planets brighter than in the visible. We knew that this was coming, it’s been a hot topic for a while, but I thought we were a few years off. If confirmed (that part is very important), it would be very far out from its star, 11 times the distance of Neptune, and weigh 8 times the mass of Jupiter. Astronomers determined that it is an extrasolar planet candidate from its spectrum, but time will tell if it is actually gravitationally bound.

Very cool!!!