JWST and NASA at SXSW

Northrop Grumman and NASA brought the full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope to the annual craziness in Austin that is South By Southwest. (For the record, I twitch uncontrollably when people abbreviate it to "South By" - if for no other reason in that it breaks the reference to North By Northwest, one of my favorite movies!) Working with one of our professors, they asked for volunteers to come down and help talk about the telscope and work at some of the tables in the NASA Experience tent, so I was down there for a while on Friday and all day Sunday. At the last minute I decided to throw my DSLR and my little travel tripod into my backpack since I knew that they were lighting the model up colorfully at night and that I had to get some photos. And I'm glad I did since I'm really happy with the way the photos turned out! Click on the photo at the top to go to the full Flickr set.

I had a great time talking about the telescope for the first part of the day even if I did manage to sunburn the top of my head. I was a little surprised that a few people asked if the model was the actual telescope, although I think everyone who asked that prefaced it with "I don't think it is, but I have to ask...". At one of the tables in the tent there were parts of the actual materials of the telescope, mostly the left over ends of things that were cut for the structure. I played with the parts a little on Friday and they are quite light, but that isn't too surprising given that it will have to be launched in to space.

I spent the afternoon working at the table with the infrared camera (the JWST will be an infrared telescope), which was a lot of fun. Kids in particular had a blast sticking their hands into the bucket of ice water and seeing how it looked on the camera. The most interesting visitor was a man with a medical condition that caused poor circulation in two of his fingers on one hand and the difference was quite easily visible.

And at the end of the day, the JWST folks made a successful attempt for an official Guinness World Record for Largest Astronomy Lesson. (The Guinness people are often at SXSW for a variety of interesting attempts at official records.) I stayed to watch that, but took off as soon as it was over since a day of sun, wind, talking, and allergies caught up to me!

Richard III news round-up

[I decided to cross post this from my Tudorhistory blog since the science is just as important as the history!]

As expected, the University of Leicester announced this morning that they have confirmed that the remains found last summer are indeed those of Richard III. (You can see my initial round-up from September here.)

Here is the re-launched site about the project from the university: The search for Richard III - completed.

You will find photos and information about all of the lines of inquiry that went into the identification there. The video of the press conference is supposed to be uploaded at some point as well. You can find the presentations by the speakers at the press conference here. They also mentioned on their twitter account that all of the research will be submitted to academic journals for peer review. (I'll stay out of the discussion of public and media interest vs. academic procedure, since I honestly don't know what the proper answer is. I've seen in the sciences that "press conference before peer review" can have unfortunate results, but I've also seen conclusions validated once papers are published.)

Here are some other informative links:

* Leicester car park skeleton 'is that of Richard III'

* Richard III discovery in pictures

* Richard III dig: DNA confirms bones are king's

* Richard III: The twisted bones that reveal a king

* Richard III's remains found in Leicester (nice diagram of the site on this one)

I've also seen some remarks about the DNA testing not being the "proof" that it is being presented as, and that is technically correct. There is a chance that it is coincidence that the Michael Ibsen and Richard III have the same mitochondrial DNA because of its nature (if it is rare or common will affect the significance of the match). They were also able to track down another maternal line relative who consented to testing (but wished to remain anonymous) and the mtDNA matched between Ibsen and the anonymous subject as well as matching to the skeleton. We'll know more once the academic paper comes out but in the text of the presentation the scientist is quoted as saying "The analysis showed that these two individuals shared the same relatively rare mitochondrial DNA sequence." I would also point out that the DNA tests did not exclude positive identification of Richard III (either because the skeleton wasn't Richard's or from mistakes in the genealogy) so that is helpful information as well. There is also on-going work with testing the Y-chromosome against known male-only lines, but this is more difficult and may be inconclusive for a variety of reasons.

To me, the osteological evidence, the historical and archaeological evidence, and the fact that the DNA and carbon dating results do not rule it out, the identification of the bones as those of Richard III does seem to be the correct conclusion. But keep in mind my degree is in astronomy, not archaeology! Still, all-in-all, it was an exciting day for me as a fan of both science and history.

Seeing a conspiracy around every corner

... or at least I have to think that is how some people go through life.

This is something I've wondered about for a long time, especially when I see people like Alex Jones going on and on about FEMA camps, black helicopters, etc. - how do people end up with a mindset that they see conspiracy in EVERYTHING? And to narrow it down some, why are so many people either afraid or seeing conspiracy in everything in the night sky? Was is started by all the noise around 2012? No, these things have been around for a long, long time - from ominous portents to selling "comet pills" to prevent being poisoned by the tail of Halley's Comet in 1910. But I can't help thinking that the 2012 stuff has created a revival of sorts.

The latest thing that prompted this thought was an email that came in to one of our general addresses and was forwarded on to me. It was a question about the object next to the moon on Monday January 21, which is a common type of inquiry we get when something bright is near something else bright in the night sky. (In this case it was Jupiter, which some lucky people got to see as an occultation - very cool!) Again, this is a very common question we get, but what caught my eye at the end of the email was "Can you tell me or is it a secret?". As I said on twitter.... "sigh". Considering that looking at it with even a decent pair of binoculars would reveal it to be Jupiter, it would be a very hard secret to keep if we tried!

Since I had the name and email address of the submitter, I decided to break out the Google and poke around. Sure enough, I found both the name and address on some forums dedicated to, shall we say... less than scientific modes of thinking. (Really, it was some serious woo-woo stuff going on there.) I could have asked him why he would have asked the "secret" question, but I'm honestly not sure that would have helped a whole lot. Plus, I'm just not that confrontational (which is probably a good thing in my line of work, it keeps me out of trouble!).

I know that in some cases (and possibly in this case, based on what I found) there is something genuinely wrong with the person's brain - and I mean that in a clinical sense, not to be flippant. And in other cases, I think it stems from a general human reaction to fear what they don't understand. After all, that was a pretty advantageous trait when we were evolving in the African savanna. So is the solution, in these latter cases, more education? I hope so, since I think that is a problem that CAN be fixed. Yes, I'm an optimist. :)

Happy New Year!

Here's hoping that 2013 turns out to have all of the awesome of 2012 and none of the crap.

Space Shuttle Endeavour visits Austin, Part Deux

On September 20, the Space Shuttle Endeavour did a fly-over of Austin and I caught a really cool photo of it with the UT Tower. You can see my original blog post about it here.

Shuttle #Endeavour flying next to the UT Tower #spottheshuttle #austin twitpic.com/awk6ky

— Lara Eakins (@LaraEakins) September 20, 2012

The weird thing was that for the next few months, after the initial rush of the first few days, I still saw a trickle of retweets, views, and comments.

Then, I got a tweet from someone at Twitter saying that they would like to use the tweet/photo as part of an official Twitter project. I was intrigued, but figured it would show up somewhere buried in a 2012 wrap-up. Well, I was partially correct, it was in a 2012 wrap-up, but buried it certainly wasn't! Imagine my surprise when it showed up here:

Only on Twitter

And here:



And here:



And in the video itself:


(Below the Curiosity rover and next to Barack and Michelle Obama. Seriously?!?!)

And here's the whole video:



And one of the more amusing places that the photo and tweet showed up was this blog entry from the TexasExes: UT Tower Lands on Twitter’s Most Popular Posts of 2012


Compared to Barack Obama's most re-tweeted tweet ever, my little photo and tweet of the Space Shuttle Endeavour was nothing. But to an average person like me it was a big deal!

The stats as of today, the last day of 2012, are: on Flickr - over 5500 views, 100+ favorites and 39 comments. The actual tweet directly from my account was retweeted about 800 times, but I also sent it to several local news outlets and *their* tweets also got a lot of traffic so the twitpic is edging towards 35,000 views! There were also several shares and about 800 likes on Facebook (I think, it's hard to track stuff like that on Facebook) and there were shares on Google+ and on blogs. I did a search on the link to the Twitpic (http://twitpic.com/awk6ky) and saw all sorts of links that I didn't even know about before! And I've gained about 150 followers in the past few weeks - I'm sure most of them are people hunting for follow-backs or are spambots, but still, it's kind of cool. :)

I did post a couple more pictures of the fly-over, although they weren't as special as the Tower shot, I did like this one of it coming in:



While I doubt 2013 will bring anything like this, I'm still excited to see what happens in the new year!

2012 was a pretty amazing year

I knew going in that 2012 was going to be a pretty busy year for me, and it was! Personally the highlights were the AAS meeting in January, successfully pulling off the very popular public viewing of the Venus transit in June, and seeing the Space Shuttle Endeavour in September (more about that later...). But in the broader world, there was some pretty incredible stuff this year. There were also some sad good-byes and heartbreaking tragedies, and I know it was a rough year for some of my friends and acquaintances, but I want to focus on the good things.

Humans literally went to the extremes - James Cameron solo dived to the deepest part of the Earth's oceans, while Felix Baumgartner jumped from a balloon in the stratosphere. And we got to see both occur live on our computers.

Physicists have probably discovered the Higgs boson, one of the key points of modern Standard Model of physics. (I'll refrain from grousing about how it could have been discovered 15 years sooner and here in Texas if the Congress hadn't been so short-sighted in canceling the Superconducting Supercollider in 1993.)

I saw a man run in the Olympics on two artificial legs. Wow.

Private spaceflight is becoming a reality and SpaceX is proved it can do the job of the low-earth orbit tasks and leave the big stuff, like going beyond Earth orbit, to NASA.

And the highlight, in my opinion, was the amazing landing of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover on Mars. I *still* can't believe that worked...

On a more personal and far less scientific note, this was a great year for one of my favorite places on Earth - London. The Queen's Diamond Jubilee was a great warm-up to their hosting the Olympics just a few weeks later and I loved every minute of watching both. I realized while watching the Olympics - in particular the cycling at Hampton Court Palace - that of all the cities that have hosted the Olympics, London is the one I've spent the most time in. (And I've only been in 2 other cities that have hosted - Rome, which hosted the games before I was born, and Atlanta. Well, technically I've been in St. Louis too, but only the airport!).

From my history side - the possible discovery of the remains of Richard III. The historical detective work that went into if was amazing enough, but the fact that they have found remains that, circumstantially at this point, might be what they were looking for is astounding. It still gives me chills!

On my geeky side - "The Avengers" was amazing and I'm still so impressed that Marvel has been able to put together such a good string of movies and was able to bring it all together into a movie that was even better than the sum of its parts. The finale to the Batman trilogy was perfect as well. And we got to go back to Middle Earth! But the tops for me was the acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney and the announcement that we would indeed get episodes VII, VIII, and IX. This is a kind of Holy Grail of my childhood, to see all 9 episodes of the Star Wars "Skywalker family" saga actually happen. And I'm looking forward to some of the other Star Wars projects that have been mentioned outside of the 9-part sage. Personally I'd love to see some stuff set in the Old Republic days.

I'm sure there are things I'm missing, but these are a few of the things that will make 2012 special in my memories!

Well... we're still here

Do I get to say "I told you so" now?

I haven't blogged about it much (if at all?) but I have occasionally ranted on Twitter about the questions, usually in phone calls, that I've been getting for YEARS about the so-called Mayan apocalypse coming on December 21, 2012.

I think the first calls started coming around 2006 after one of the many programs that have since been repeated endlessly the on cable channels first aired. I remember in particular a dad who was concerned about his 11 or 12-year-old son who was getting depressed after watching some of these programs. After talking for a while with the dad, I could suss out that there were other family issues (a divorce or separation in particular) and this was probably feeding an already stressful situation. My main recommendation then, after assuring him that the stuff in those programs were mostly nonsense, was to have his son talk with a school counselor. I think I talked with him a couple of times, but I don't know for sure how it all turned out.

Edited to add: While I was looking through some unpublished draft posts (that's what I get for switching around blogs so much - stuff gets accidentally left behind!) I found a bit more that I had written several years ago about this particular caller:

I got a call from a guy who had watched some wretched History Channel show about how the Mayan calendar was predicting the end of the world in 2012. The man's son (who I think was about 11 years old?) was so freaked out by it that he was having trouble sleeping, wouldn't eat and was generally withdrawing from life over it. I basically told him that it was all stupid mystery-mongering and it was no different from our calendar switching to 2000. He ended up calling back several times and we talked about how to be skeptical about those types of programs. (I also recommended that the son at least talk to a counselor at school since I think there might have been other issues that were at play). He ended up talking to the assistant of one of the authors shown briefly in the program and she told him that the author was very upset at how they had totally taken his work out of context and misreprensented it. I think I had used those exact words when I was describing to my caller some of the tactics that those programs use. I also recommended some books to him and we also talked a little about skeptical thinking in general and I think that I might have made a new skeptic by the time all was said and done.

I had forgotten about the rest of that conversation!

I've gotten a few random questions over the years, but there has been one guy who has called many times over that stretch. In a way, it was actually a good thing that he kept calling since through him I was able to find out what the latest claims were that were being tied to what I started calling "the kitchen sink" of doomsday conspiracy theories. And boy were there a lot of claims. I sometimes fell down a rabbit hole of stupid by looking up on YouTube the terms or people he was asking about. I haven't heard from him in a while but I *think* I was finally getting through to him, especially after he asked for telescope recommendations! I think that stemmed from the common claim that some bright object in the sky (usually Jupiter or Venus) was the mythical Nibiru/Planet X that was supposed to either hit us or pass close enough to flip us over on December 21. I would tell him that it was either of those planets and he would say "how do you know?" or would edge towards some of the "NASA is hiding stuff" arguments. So I told him, you can look at it yourself and see that it is Jupiter or Venus if you don't believe me. And maybe, just maybe, he did.

Then there were a couple of guys who actually came in person to the astronomy department wanting to talk with people, and in those cases, ended up in my office. These were the ones that had the potential to be pretty scary and the thought crossed my mind that I should ask for a panic button in my office (the problem being - I'm a complete klutz and would likely hit the thing accidentally if it was in an easily accessible place when I actually needed it.) One of the guys was, I think, more of an Electric Universe guy (and that's a blog post for another day, but there are other astronomers who have already done some good take-downs on that stuff). But the second one was one of a few people I've talked with who were buying in to the conspiracy talk about "gaps" in the Google Sky maps or things that show up in the IR but not in the visible, etc. Some of those were part of the Nibiru/Planet X stuff, but it was all pretty easily debunked. Unfortunately I completely messed up the answer on what one of those objects was, but since he was actually there in my office, at least I showed him in person the methodology I was using... it just ended up pointing to the wrong answer. But the answer *still* wasn't Nibiru/Planet X!

I don't anticipate that I'll hear from any of those people again or that they will call and say "Yep, you were right!". And I know that we'll still be dealing with versions of these claims for many years to come - the Mayan calendar thing was just a convenient date, but most of the claims were around before and will be around after. I've already seen rumblings about a comet that has a chance to be really spectacular next year, similar to the non-story that was Comet Elenin last year. (And I'll note that all of the "see, nothing happened then, did it?" arguments didn't disabuse most people of their 2012 beliefs, so I don't anticipate the non-pocalypse of 2012 will keep people from buying in to future claims.) But if we're lucky, the comet will be another bright Hale-Bopp-like show, but hopefully without a cult suicide this time. I have to admit that the main reason I waited until today to post this was on the outside possibility that a story broke late yesterday of some Jonestown or Heaven's Gate incident, but thankfully it seems none was forthcoming. Whew.

So December 21, 2012 turned out to be just another day, like I and many other people said it would be. Solar activity was low, there were the usual number of earthquakes, no supervolcano eruptions, asteroid impacts, etc. I personally used it to catch up on laundry because I've been sick for a week and a half!

And before I forget - a BIG thanks to 2012hoax.org for creating the best place for sending people to get good, scientific answers to these claims and giving people a place to air their concerns and be reassured. I know they are planning to re-tool the site into a place that will be useful beyond this 2012 "expiration date" and I'm sure I'll be sending people to the new site too.

Since this is getting long, I'll save the "wow, 2012 actually turned out to be a pretty amazing year" stuff for another post!

* * * * * * *
The picture at the top is of the Temple of Kukulkan at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. Since that was the image that most people seem to include in their 2012 posts, I figured I'd at least pick on with me in it. Yep, that's a 15-year-old me in the green shirt and straw hat in the middle of the photo. I still have that hat! Not pictured: the crutch that I had used to help me get up the pyramid because I had broken my ankle about 6 weeks earlier and was just then getting my muscle back in my leg to walk without support. The friend that took the picture carried the crutch back down so I could inch my way down along the chain that runs on the side you can climb to aid people going up and down - those stairs are thin and steep!

McDonald Observatory and West Texas 2012

I traveled out to McDonald Observatory for work back in July and I'm just now getting around to posting the photos! This was the first time I'd been out in 5 years, and the first time since I had ventured into playing with HDR photography (more about that here, with my first HDR photo) so I figured I would have fun taking photos in what little spare time I had. That's the one thing about going out there for the board meetings - it's pretty much two days of travel and two days of being really busy! And to top it off, I managed to catch a cold shortly before leaving, so I was fighting the fatigue from that the whole time too. But it is always nice to get out to the dark skies and mountains of west Texas!

The area is recovering well from the horrible fires of 2011 and had even had a little rain in the week before I was there, so things greened up a little. The weather was great while I was there, and as usual, I was caught off-guard by how chilly it can get after dark, even in the middle of summer. (Seriously, I've been out there several times in July, you would think I would have learned my lesson by now!)

I had a chance to look through the 107" and the 36" telescopes this year, and it really brought home how much I am missing with the 16" in the middle of Austin (and with a very dirty mirror at the moment). When you aren't used to it, it can be a bit of a shock to be able to look into the eyepiece and see the Ring nebula straight on and without any of the tricks (filters, averted vision, etc.) that we have to do in the city. Perhaps the most astounding was the Whirlpool Galaxy and easily being able to see the spiral arms. And of course, Saturn was its usual gorgeous self!

On the way out Sunday morning I decided to leave a different way so I could swing through the Sierra Madera impact crater. I had done it once before when I was out in 2003, shortly after writing a paper on the impact craters in Texas for a geology class. I knew that at some point fairly recently they had put up signs on the highway to tell people that they were driving through it. It would be nice if they eventually put up a historical marker or some sort of information plaque, but just the acknowledgement that it was there at all is pretty cool!

The picture at the top goes to my Flickr set from the trip. You'll see that I went a bit overboard with the HDR on a few of the shots, but I was having fun!

A few thoughts on college education

Since I'm trying to get back in to blogging and writing more, I thought this would be a good place to jot down a few rambling thoughts I had today - mostly so I would have a place to refer back to it in the future!

(Anyone who stumbles across this and actually reads it - keep in mind that I've never taken an education class and am not very familiar with pedagogy and that most of the education I've done is in the informal outreach setting.)

One of our professors is planning to implement a "flipped classroom" approach for his introductory astronomy class next semester and part of my job will be helping him put together the materials. One of the "evangelists" of the technique in our college gave a seminar about it today and I tagged along to learn a few things - although I was hoping they might get a little more into the technology (which is what I wil mainly be doing). Still, I found it to be an interesting discussion of teaching and learning in the modern day university.

Near the end he was talking about some of the student feedback, both good and bad, after taking a class taught that way. The bad feedback was a comment from a student who said they wanted the professor to give clear lectures and spell out exactly how and on what materials they would be tested. I was nodding along with that so the seminar presenter asked for thoughts and pointed to me, and I mentioned, although I am not personally a faculty member, I have heard our faculty complaining about students having this attitude. Basically, they want a cookbook class - a set of numbered instructions that they need to follow to get the results they are looking for (a good grade, presumably). One of the actual faculty members chimed in and said "basically, they don't want to think". I wouldn't have put it quite that bluntly, but I think she was kind of right. At least I don't feel that the students want to have to think outside of a pre-instilled idea of how education is supposed to work. And that gets me to the epiphany that I had one the walk back to my office - this is the fallout of the state testing that the students who are now in college (if they grew up in Texas) have been doing all their school career. I realize that this is a broad generalization, and it might not even be the right conclusion, but it the idea just seemed to 'click' with me. Teachers are told the topics that they need to teach because those are the topics the students will be tested on. And in some cases, the students are basically told "these are the facts you will be tested on, learn them". And then at the end of the year (depending on their school grade) they are tested on just those concepts and facts. So when these students get to college, they kind of expect the things to be laid out the same way. The university does require a syllabus to be handed out to the students on the first day and that they will know what goes in to calculating their final grade, and I don't have a problem with that. But the feeling I'm getting is that students just want to be given a list of facts and concepts (or problem types) that they will be tested over and then that is all that will show up on exams. I've *literally* been told by a student "just give me the answer". But I, and others, don't think that is the end-all-be-all of education - to just be told a bunch of info by a professor and then regurgitate that answer back to them on homework, quizzes, and exams. You're not really LEARNING.

The example I alluded to above was up at the telescope one night. I run a public night that students also go to in order to do observing assignments from some of the professors (from our university and from the local community college and high schools). So, they often come in with a worksheet with little blanks to fill in (already getting a little too "cookbookish" for my taste for the college students, but these are mostly non-science majors) and come to me to get the info to fill in to those little blanks. Sometimes the answers are straightforward - the size of the telescope, things like that. But sometimes the questions give me a chance to make the students work for it a little instead of just *giving* the answer. In the case I'm remembering, we were looking at the binary star system Albireo in Cygnus, which is a pretty double with one golden star and one blue star. One of the students was writing down the info in order to write it up for a class assignment and needed to write down why the stars are different colors. I asked what class they were in and surmised that it wasn't going too far to expect them to either know or at least be able to guess what the correct answer was (they have different temperatures). After one or two half-hearted guesses the exasperated student said, in a not-too-kind tone "just give me the answer!". My immediate thought was to say "no, at least go look it up for yourself", but instead I asked around to the other students, one of whom knew the answer (and who I think was in the same class as the original student).

I'm sure there are - and always will be - lazy students who just want to follow a prescribed regimen and give a stock answer to straightforward questions. And I don't think any new teaching techniques will get to those students. But for the students who really want to learn and are really interested in the subjects, taking advantage of the new technology available to us - that the students are very comfortable with since the kids now in college grew up with it - is something at least worth trying. One of the speakers described the teacher as "coach" in the flipped classroom model, and I really liked that idea. You can teach them technique and give pointers to improve performance, but ultimately the student has to perform on their own.

Space Shuttle Endeavour visits Austin

The shuttle Endeavour left Florida on its way to Los Angeles where it will be housed at the California Science Center and on the way it has made a few stops and flybys. It stopped over in Houston last night and I knew that a re-fueling stop in El Paso was on the schedule, so I was hoping that it would make a fly over Austin as well. And it turned out that they had scheduled a low pass over the Capitol, which I knew we'd be able to see really well from my office building on the UT campus. So (even though I was up on the telescope last night) I decided to come in early and try to get a picture. Funny enough, the ones I got of it over the Capitol and city weren't all that great, but as it flew past the UT Tower, I got this shot:



(Click over to Flickr for the larger version)

I posted it to Twitter and copied the tweet to a couple of local news organizations, thinking they might want to use it for online galleries. But of course, as things often do on the internet, it took off and I've been flooded with replies, emails, Facebook comments, etc! I got a call from the Director of Public Affairs at UT and they will be handling any of the licensing that may arise. He said they were going to contact the AP (!!) so who knows? Since I took the photo at work it really is UT's to do with as they wish, I just want credit (which I know they will honor) - I can't wait to see where the image pops up!

Still kind of blown away by the reaction... And ultimately I'm just really happy that I got to see the shuttle!!