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!!

A summer to say goodbye to heroes

Although I think both Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong shied away from the label 'hero' both were heroes to me.



I had the great pleasure of meeting Sally Ride when she gave a talk at UT a few years ago. She was a great inspiration to me and many other young girls who at some point dreamed of being an astronaut. After leaving NASA she founded Sally Ride Science which is dedicated to getting young people interested in science, a mission very close to my heart!



Sadly I never had a chance to meet or even see Neil Armstrong in person, but I have seen many artifacts of his astronaut career over the years. And pretty much every time I look at the moon I stop and think - people have walked there!

In that vein, I loved the final paragraph of the statement from the Armstrong family:

For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.

Not surprisingly that resonated with many people and the hashtag #winkatthemoon took off on Twitter and has spawned several websites and galleries of people submitting photos of the moon. It was a great way to honor not just Neil Armstrong, but the whole Apollo program. I can only hope we'll be seeing humans follow in Neil's footsteps soon.

Per ardua ad astra

Transit of Venus

Now that I've had time to recover a little, I thought I would write up my experience organizing and running the public viewing of the June 5, 2012 Transit of Venus event.

Based on my experiences with the "Mars Close Approach" event in 2003, I knew going in that it would almost certainly be a very busy day and prepared for it. The transit of Venus happens in pairs 8 years apart every 100+ years and after the one in 2012 the next chance would be December 2117. Who knows what advances in medical science will do to increase our longevity over the next 100 years, but regardless, the majority of us won't be around to see the next transit of Venus. Since the one in 2004 wasn't visible in Austin, this was basically my only chance to see it with my own eyes. And pretty much ever since the 2004 transit, the 2012 one had been on my long-term horizon as something to plan for at work.

As we got closer to the day, I was contacted by the local amateur astronomy club, the Austin Astronomical Society, and the Astronomy Students Association (our undergraduate group, which I was a charter member of back in the day!) to do a joint event. This ended up working out well since it meant a lot of instruments and volunteers - and in the end we needed them all!

We didn't really know how many people to expect since we weren't requiring reservations or RSVPs. I had received a few phone calls and emails but since we had the information posted on the web it was hard to predict how many people would actually come. We estimated about 1000 people came to view Mars at the 2003 event that I was using for comparison, so I wasn't too surprised that we got swamped. One of my fellow organizers was expecting a few hundred over the three hours it was visible in Austin, but in the end we estimated that about 2500 people came through the various lines. At one point the line wound its way down the stairwell from the 17th floor to the 4th floor (the ground level for my building)!

The weather was the big concern going in to the day and the forecast looked a little dodgy for a while. But in the end the clouds mostly stayed away and we saw all but the last 15-20 minutes that the transit was visible in Austin.

I started the day in the room that our solar telescope projects in to, but only about the first 90 minutes of the transit was going to be visible there. I was actually happy to be the person to run that since it meant I got to stay inside in the air conditioning for the hottest part of the event! The image at the top is of the view we had from the solar telescope - it's about a three foot image on the wall.

Once we closed up the heliostat I set up a live stream in the auditorium and checked on the state of the line. We knew after a point that there was no way that people joining the line would be able to get to the roof in time, so that's when we started sending people to the live stream. They wouldn't get to see it with their own eyes through a telescope, but at least they got to see it and ask questions of astronomers!

I went up to the roof for the last 45 minutes or so and stayed with the undergraduates (and sneaked a peek through our 8-in telescope with solar filter they were using) until the sun ducked behind the clouds about 20 minutes before sunset. I also looked at it unmagnified through a welder's glass and the dot of Venus was easily visible.

I stayed around to take down signs, etc. and finally left around 9:30 p.m., completely exhausted (I logged over 12,000 steps on my pedometer), but so glad that we were able to pull off a pretty successful event!

Sherwood Forest Faire 2012

I've posted my photos from last weekend's trip to the Sherwood Forest Faire over on Flickr. I didn't get quite as many good photos from the joust this year since the area where I took up close photos last year (and got a face full of dust) was very muddy this year. No complaints though, we need the rain. I also managed, on a mostly cloudy day in a space mostly covered by trees, to get a little sunburned. Quite a talent!

See the photos here

Thunderstorm from summer 1998

While I was going through some old video transfers at work, I found the one I did of a video I shot at Enchanted Rock State Park back in 1998. I was out there to give a talk about meteor showers during special events they were having to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Texas Parks and Wildlife. I didn't get any video of the meteor shower, but I did get these shots of a nearby thunderstorm before sunset (things did clear up nicely for the meteor shower itself). The quality isn't great, but it was a fun test of the process and I was able to make a 20x version so you can see some of the movement of the storm.

Historical Astronomy exhibit at the HRC

Heliocentric diagram from Nicolaus Copernicus' "De Revolutionibus"

I mentioned in a previous post that I went over to the Harry Ransom Center on the Friday at the end of the AAS meeting to see the small exhibit of astronomy texts and items that they had set up for the week. I had already seen several of the items (and I really wish they had brought out the Tycho with the etching of the coats of arms of his ancestors - including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) but it was neat to see them again. There were also a few items from the Herschel collection that I don't think I've seen before. And this was just a small fraction of the stuff they had out for the International Year of Astronomy exhibit back in 2009.

You can see the full set on Flickr here

AAS Day 5

The final day - and it was a busy one!

It's kind of ironic that the one day I was actually able to make the 8:30 a.m. talk was the final day of the conference. I guess part of it was that I skipped the apparently epic party the night before. :)

I'm glad that I was able to make it to the talk since it was one that was about something that I think about a lot "The Evolving Context for Science and Society", presented by Alan Leshner, Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Interestingly, before Leshner, Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Tx) spoke for a few minutes (he wasn't on the program and came over at the last minute from a nearby function). I wish I had a recorder with me since I would like to be able to quote some of the stuff he said so I "un-spin" the politics from it. Also, I would to have had a chance to ask him why, if he is the science fan and champion he claims to be, he authored a bill that would have broken the internet.

A lot of what Leshner was talking about was stuff that I already know about and think about, but I'd be willing to bet that some fraction of the audience hadn't. I posted a lot to Twitter about this, so most of what I'm writing here was compiled from those tweets.

Leshner started out by laying out the case for why the general public needs to have some fundamental understanding of science: because it is in every part of our lives now. Then he moved on to the conflicts between science and society. He first looked at legitimate problems that science has such as ethics violations, exaggerated claims, etc. that cause poor views of scientists. There are also problems that scientists face, such as poor funding (he had an interesting remark about how he hears people now saying they are happy when they have flat funding as opposed to taking budget cuts). Leshner did have nice words for how astronomy does decadal surveys and that most other science fields don't.

Leshner then moved on to the conflicts between science and the public, including what the causes behind those conflicts might be. Part of it is that people have little understanding of what is and what is not science, giving examples such as ESP, evolution denial, astrology. Another factor is tension of science conflicting with political and economic issues, the prime example being global warming. There is also when science conflicts with core human values, such as research on embryonic stem cells. In addition, generally speaking, the public does not feel immediate consequences of science denial, although scientists to (for example, public opinion calling for elimination of stem cell research - the funding gets axed but the public might not realize that the research was beneficial to them until it is too late).

So, how do we fix this?

Leshner said that education is important, but that we can't just educate our way out of the problem. We need to change our approach and engage with the public - talk WITH instead of just TO the public. Personal engagement works best, let people actually see what you do. (Possibly not as big a deal with astronomers, but I could see how this would be particularly important in the biological sciences.) One of the more quotable lines (and it got me several re-tweets) was "some scientists are bad at speaking, but some also aren't good at listening.". His core point at the end: "the science-society relationship needs constant attention."

Some thoughts I have on the talk - I definitely agree with Leshner's approach, but sometimes those initial conversations of trying to talk WITH (as opposed TO) the public can be difficult when the people you are trying to engage don't have some basic level of understanding. When I tweeted to that effect, I was mainly thinking of people who have been literally calling for years who are scared of 2012 doomsday nonsense. When I try to deconstruct the claims that they have heard it can be quite difficult because the caller doesn't have a basic grasp of astronomy or how the sky works. I don't necessarily have the time to break it down to the basics and give them an introductory lecture on astronomy. And I've found that just as soon as I start trying to explain one claim, it brings up another! (Yes, I'm afraid my frustration is coming through...).

I certainly don't have all the answers for how to fix these problems, and unfortunately there will be some people that will be unreachable no matter what (due to strongly-held religious beliefs, retreating into conspiracies or what have you...). I don't recall Leshner addressing the media's role in the equation much, and that is certainly something else to consider. One of these days I'll try to write some more of my thoughts on all of this, but suffice to say the talk got me thinking about it even more than I already do!

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After Leshner's talk I went to one of the Exoplanets sessions. I had expected this to be the last science session I would get to, but it turned out my tear-down duites didn't take the whole 5 hours I had been scheduled for. So, I grabbed a sandwich and ate (as quietly as possible) during my co-worker Don Winget's talk "White Dwarf Stars from the Telescope to the Laboratory and Back Again: Exploring Extreme Physics". The white dwarf team here at UT does a lot of neat work and they've hooked up with people who are able to simulate white dwarf atmospheres in the lab. Cool stuff!

I checked in with the organizers and they didn't need help at that moment, so I managed to sneak in to another science session: "Kepler Observations of Exoplanets and Systems". While there I spotted Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute! One of the talks in that session was about my new favorite term: exomoons. Yes, moons around planets in other solar systems. Kepler hasn't found any yet, but it's only a matter of time! There was an interesting question as to whether that project was also looking for evidence of rings around the Kepler planets. They aren't but they are flagging potential candidates for other researchers to follow up with. One of the final talks was on circumbinary planets (think Tatooine), given by Bill Welsh whom I knew when he was a post-doc here at UT. Here's the press release on the research: NASA Discovers New Double-Star Planet Systems

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Well, that's it for AAS 219! The next time the general session meeting comes back to Texas it won't be here in Austin, so I'm not sure whether I will go or not. I have a few years to decide though!

AAS Day 4

I had the best of intentions to get to Robert Kirshner's talk on "Exploding Stars and the Accelerating Universe" (an interesting topic to begin with, but I also know he's a good speaker) but I had to get gas and money before going in to the convention center so I didn't make it in time. The work he discussed is the research that led to the discovery of "Dark Energy" and was honored with the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. I knew that was research that would eventually be awarded a Nobel but what I wasn't sure of was how they were going to choose *who* to award given the large number of people who contributed to the discovery (a lot of projects are done by research teams). In the end it was awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam G. Riess as team leaders. Hopefully someday I'll be seeing some of my co-workers getting that prize after figuring out what dark energy actually is with HETDEX!

I didn't have volunteer duty in the morning so I went to the "Solar System and Extrasolar Habitable Zones" session. Because the majority of planetary (in *our* solar system) research is presented at the AAS Division for Planetary Sciences and the American Geophysical Union meetings, there isn't usually that much of it at the AAS general meeting. (I really need to start trying to convince some of my co-workers that it's time for the DPS to come back to Austin - it's been here three times including the first unofficial one organized by Carl Sagan and Harlan Smith.)

The first talk from the session was about the Habitable Zone Gallery project that tracks the orbits of planets discovered around other stars and how they related to their parent star's habitable zone. There were also talks about the impact that formed the Moon, Kuiper Belt Objects, atmospheres of "Super-Earths" and Saturn's weird moon Iapetus.

I did another round of lunch and posters and grabbed stuff at some of the booths (including some interesting freebie journals) and then when to the NASA Town Hall. I went a little early, which turned out to be a good thing since it ended up packed. The first to speak was former astronaut John Grunsfeld who was just appointed as Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA (I wonder if that all fits on his business card?). Grunsfeld flew on five shuttle missions, including three Hubble Space Telescope servicing missions so he's another one of my heroes. :) He has a PhD in physics and has served as NASA Chief Scientist and as Deputy Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute. The second speaker was Dr. Paul Hertz, the new NASA Chief Scientist. Unfortunately I once again had a low laptop battery so I didn't take notes at this session either.

One of my co-workers was part of a session titled "Astronomers: Teach Climate Change" and I wish I could have attended it but I had to work at another session. I had a nice chat with him at lunch about the topic though and I was really pleased to hear that he's been incorporating climate change topics into his introductory astronomy classes at UT!

The session I was working was on Spiral Galaxies and it ran over, so I was a little late to the last talk I was working "Galaxy Formation Star-by-Star: the View from the Milky Way" by Kathryn Johnson. Thankfully they didn't really need much in the way of volunteer help!

Also today, the Kepler Mission team made even more great exoplanet announcements (there are always great press releases during these meetings and the exoplanet people really had some good ones this year!) including: NASA's Kepler Mission Finds Three Smallest Exoplanets. So basically we're finding planets in habitable zones and finding Earth-sized planets so it is only a matter of time until we find the holy grail: an Earth-sized planet in a habitable zone around a Sun-like star. (If I was a betting person, I take a chance and say we'll find one before the end of the year.) More about exoplanets tomorrow!

AAS Day 3

I started off the day a little late (again) but had a chance to get a few photos of friends at posters before heading to my first session.


Drs. Mary Kay Hemenway and Chris Sneden and the SOFIA Teachers with their research poster.

I designed the poster above, so I had to get a photo of the authors with it!

The first session I worked was also one that I was interested in anyway - "Professional Ethics in Astronomy: An Ongoing Dialogue". One of the panelists was a professor at my university many years ago, but I'm pretty sure he didn't remember me. The discussion was very interesting and it makes me really glad that I don't have to deal with a lot of the issues that some of my colleagues do! I wish I had taken more detailed notes on the actual talks and resulting questions and conversations but my laptop battery was low. Anyone interested in the topic should check out the Sigma Xi ethics publications. Unfortunately the session that is probably most related to my own work - "Education, Outreach and Citizen Science" was at the same time so I wasn't able to attend.

The next talk I attended was the Annie Jump Cannon Prize lecture by this year's recipient, Rachel Mandelbaum. The Cannon Prize is awarded to a young woman PhD astronomer residing in North America. Looking over the list of previous winners I realized that I personally know several of them!

After a quick lunch and stroll through the posters, I worked a session on "Pulsars and Neutron Stars", which thankfully ended a little early so I could run over to catch the end of the "Working in Science Policy" panel. This is another one that I wish I could have attended, partly out of interest but also because one of the panelists was an old friend. I got a brief chance to say "hi" at the end of the panel, but moved aside so he could talk with people who were actually there to learn about jobs. :) While I was there I ran into another old friend that I had been meaning to catch up with and ended up sitting around and talking with her for the next few hours instead of attending more talks.

After catching up for a while we decided to go out for dinner at one of my favorites - Threadgill's (her choice since she's the one who doesn't get to Austin much, but there wasn't an argument from me!), along with her editor from Astronomy Magazine. We popped back over to the convention center after dinner and then I bailed on the UT Astronomy alumni party and the Saving Hubble film screening (which were both going on at the same time) and went home. I really don't have the stamina for these meetings that I did back in the 1990s!

One other thing from today, the NRAO announced that the VLA in New Mexico has been renamed the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in honor of the founder of radio astronomy. A very appropriate choice!

AAS - Day 2

This was the first full day of the meeting after the previous night's opening reception (which I decided not to attend). I skipped the 8:00 a.m. welcoming address and 8:30 a.m. invited session this day in favor of a few extra minutes of sleep.

My first volunteer session was on "Exciting Astrophysics: Supernovae, Relativistic Astrophysics, and Other Results I" and it was my first introduction to the system they have devised for getting the talks into all of the rooms from the central "speaker ready room". The idea is to have all of the speakers pre-load their talks in one central location and they are then piped to the appropriate room that is already set up with a laptop and projector (I was pleased to see all of the machines were Macs - both in the ready room and meeting rooms!) There were a few hiccups in that first session, but the a/v staff were able to get it ironed out before we were scheduled to start. Having run the a/v for MANY astronomy meetings, I was impressed by the set-up, which seemed to work really well (at least in all of the sessions I attended or worked).

After lunch I went to the James Webb Space Telescope town hall, which turned out to be as interesting as I expected, but not at all as contentious as I thought it might be given budget issues. One of the neat things mentioned in one of the talks was the live JWST construction webcam where you can see into the clean room. The final talk in the town hall was how the telescope could be used in the effort to detect and characterize the atmospheres of all of the planets we're finding around other stars. I'm still kind of amazed that we even have detected the planets, much less their atmospheres!


Model of the JWST in the Northrop Grumman booth

I worked a second volunteer session - "Exciting Astrophysics: Supernovae, Relativistic Astrophysics, and Other Results II" and I then went to the "Challenges and Achievements in 50 Years of Human Spaceflight" talk by retired NASA astronaut Steve Hawley. The talk was basically an overview of the US (and some of the Soviet/Russian) manned space program, with Hawley discussing some of his own flights. Hawley has a PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics, so he is "one of us", but it was still nice to see the standing ovation from 1000+ astronomers for an astronaut who has literally risked his life for our field.


Retired astronaut Dr. Steven Hawley speaks at the AAS meeting.

As a NASA astronaut, Hawley flew on a total of five space shuttle missions, including the deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope (STS-31), a servicing mission to Hubble (STS-82) and the deployment of the Chandra X-ray observatory (STS-93). STS-93 was Hawley's final flight and has the distinction of being the first shuttle commanded by a woman - Colonel Eileen Collins. Hawley showed this neat photo and pointed to the streak saying: "That's me!". I have my own photo of that re-entry, since it was visible over a large part of Texas.


Image: NASA

Probably one of my favorite things from Hawley's talk was that space sickness is "Space Adaptation Syndrome" in NASA speak. He also had some interesting comments about how much quicker things progressed in the early space program (Mercury, Gemini and Apollo) vs. now. Of course there is a lot more of an issue with getting and keeping funding then there was in the heady early days of manned space flight and the competition with the Russians.

After Steve Hawley's talk, the Historical Astronomy Division awarded the Doggett Prize to Woodruff T. Sullivan who presented a talk on "Cosmic Noise: The Pioneers of Early Radio Astronomy and Their Discoveries". I stayed for that talk but I was getting tired and decided not to attend the 8:00 p.m. public talk by Steven Weinberg on "Big Science in Crisis". I kind of wish I had, but I know that he is writing up the talk as an article for the New York Review of Books.