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.

In case you didn’t already hear… I passed.

Back to blogging SOON! (For real. I promise. Like give me another day or so…)

(Updated to fix time zone.)

with props to The Bloggess

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.

The first project, Moon Mappers, is underway, where you can classify surface features from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s images of the Moon. Get started with crater classifications, or pit your visual recognition software (aka your brain) against a computer.

CosmoQuest is more than just a place in which to play with data, though that is pretty cool. It’s a blog, a community forum, and a place to learn and share. And, it’s growing, so join in now! Coming soon are projects mapping the surface of asteroid Vesta and the planet Mercury.

Also, I am very happy to say that I will be working for CosmoQuest as a post-doc in a few months. That’s right; #WillAstronomForNoms was a success, and I’m going to be Pamela Gay‘s clone! Or something like that… we haven’t worked out the genetics yet.

So, I’m pretty excited, and I’m also trying to finish my thesis so I can get there! Lots. Of. Words. Wheee! Target defense date is sometime in the first week of May. So when I lose my mind between now and then, you know why.

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.

If you watch closely you may catch wind of some excellent personal news that I will blog about shortly, if you don’t already know… Also, with the last month of Serious Work® under my belt, I’m making a return to blogging, at least occasionally, over at Discovery Space News. My latest article on the APOGEE project, built at UVa, is forthcoming. AND, I have some other news about blogging to share in a bit… TEASE.

That’s all for now. Enjoy the video!

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:

The circle on the left is the entire sky overhead. Note that, as it is late afternoon in winter, the Sun is fairly low in the sky. The color scale ranges from dimmest (blue) to brightest (red). The Sun isn’t all that bright, though that is partly because it is low in the antenna “beam” where it is less sensitive. However, even when it is high in the sky, it does not necessarily dominate. The circle on the right represents the polarized emission from the sky at these frequencies.

Cyg and Cas refer to Cygnus A and Cassiopeia A, the two brightest radio sources in the sky. I love these two, as they are the first things to pop up in our own PAPER images from the Northern Hemisphere. Cygnus A is actually an active galactic nucleus, or a supermassive black hole that is eating up material around it, spewing out jets of high energy material since it’s a very messy eater. If you zoom way in on Cygnus A with something like the Very Large Array, you get this gorgeous image:

Cassiopeia A is a remnant from a supernova, or a massive star that exploded at the end of its lifetime. To the VLA, it looks like this:

And those are just TWO of the THOUSANDS of radio sources in the sky. With more data, more averaging, and improved techniques, radio astronomers are drilling further down to fainter and fainter sources in these low frequency maps. But point sources aren’t the only things to see. That dotted line across the middle represents the Milky Way, our own spiral galaxy. Unlike the starlight that we see in visible wavelengths, however, what we see in the radio is emission from electrons, tiny charged particles, as they spiral through the galaxy’s magnetic fields near the speed of light. Really cool.

With realtime data like this, the LWA and other such projects will open up a new dimension to the radio sky: the time domain. That is, with such an all-sky monitor, we’ll have records of radio sources that flare-up brightly, some of which are still unexplained. The sky is actually a huge area to search, and strange things may be happening when we are not looking. We’ve only seen the tip of the radio flare iceberg, and new tools like LWA-TV will expand our view.

*Whoops! Thanks for the correction, Jake!

Just got home from a whirlwind of family holiday travel, and I’m not even going to put my suitcase away. In a few days, I’ll be leaving again for the National Radio Sciences Meeting of URSI in Boulder, Colorado. I give a talk there on Wednesday afternoon, then I fly out to Austin two days later for the American Astronomical Society 219th Meeting. There, I’ll be at an education research workshop on Saturday morning, and my talk is Thursday afternoon. (Yes, I got *that* slot. Instrumentation, represent!) Looks like I’ll be involved in a splinter meeting about education and outreach on Thursday morning, so you’d better recover from “the party” quickly if you plan on coming! Dark Skies, Bright Kids will have a poster, so come and say hello on Wednesday. I’m sure there will be be some sort of TweetUp during the week as well. Just keep tabs on #aas219. Finally, if you happen to be applying to University of Virginia for graduate school in astronomy, email me! We love to meet prospectives.

I love visiting both of these cities, as they are full of great places to eat, listen to music, get coffee, and enjoy beautiful vistas. Of course, I might be behind my laptop working most of the time that I’m not scientifically socializing, since I have just four more months to finish this thesis. My lovely new headphones from Tim’s parents have been helpful in letting me get my work done with minimal distraction wherever I am. So, don’t make fun of me too much for looking like a radio DJ, okay? This won’t be the first time I’m working from a AAS meeting, however, as one year several of us had our laptops at the hotel bar in a frantic push to finish the DSBK website the night before our poster presentation. Fun times! When Phil Plait is making fun of you for being a nerd, you know you may have gone too far…

Here’s some interesting stuff of note from the last few weeks:

Have a Happy and Healthy New Year by telling ABC that we won’t stand for anti-vaccine ads in Times Square.

Top 10 (or 11) space stories of 2011, according to Discovery News readers. (My sunspot viewing post is #3! Thanks, guys and gals!)

The Bad Astronomer serves up the best gorgeous deep space and solar system and space pictures of 2011. Comet Lovejoy deserves an honorable mention.

Also, science vacations!

If you missed this very lovely post on “Fantasy Armor and Lady Bits,” do check it out. And the nerdalicious follow-up.

George Privon wins at Christmas cards this year. He also explains why astronomers love to increase their signal-to-noise.

Astrobites takes a look at low frequency radio astronomy with LOFAR.

SPARKLECORN!

I got this CD for Tim for Christmas. I nearly died of happiness when this song played in the car.

And finally…

Tim converted my 2002 skydiving video from VHS to something I can actually watch with modern technology! Look at what a youngin’ I was…