Portals to Space

We live in amazing times. Every day you can download new images from space onto your computer and marvel at what’s out there. I like to turn them into wallpapers for my computer monitor. Usually I use space art, particularly from Digital Blasphemy. But, I also like to put up a really good astrophoto or artist’s conception of something from any of the many mission and space agency websites out there.

The image above is from the European Southern Observatory. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used it to illustrate a press release story about the numbers of red dwarf stars in our galaxy. You can read the full release here.

The best thing about all this? What you learn about astronomy and space when you browse the press releases that come with these great images!

Communicating Astronomy

Williams College Hopkins Observatory, Williamstown, MA

I just finished a four-week stint teaching a course at Williams College called “Communicating Astronomy: Adventures Under the Dome.” It was a lot of fun and the students were a sharp group. It has been a while since I did any “formal” teaching in an academic setting. Sure, I’ve done seminars and workshops at meetings, and have taught a similar mini-workshop over at UMASS-Lowell a couple of times. It’s not the same when you plan four weeks of activities. However, I enjoyed it a lot. The students were quite inventive and wide-ranging in their interests. Their final projects were all very good and reflected today’s tools for content creation (like short animations, whiz-bang Power Points, etc.) as well as the more traditional live presentations done well.

I taught the class in Hopkins Observatory at Williams College, in the Milham Planetarium. We met three days a week, saw shows nearly every day using the systems in place there. One of the days we drove over for a visit to Sky-Skan’s dome in Nashua, NH so the students could see more show and meet other production professionals (like SS president Steve Savage, staffers Dave Miller and Jennie Zeiher, and of course, Mark Petersen, my production partner and president of Loch Ness Productions, who came up for the afternoon to talk about show production).

Class picture

While astronomy was one central theme that ran through the class, so was the communicating of it. I tried to give the students some background on various ways that astronomy stories can come to light. We discussed press practices, newsgathering, stories in the media, and of course how to find stories in legitimate sources in real life and on the Web. A lot to teach in four weeks, but it was all do-able. And this group of bright, inventive folks you see above did it.

Now I’m back home, still working on the Griffith Observatory exhibits, and a couple of other projects for various folks. Next up for big projects? Well, there is a new planetarium show project and who knows what else will walk in the door for a writer/editor/communicator in astronomy and space science?

Stardust Memories

Stardust arrives at the cleanroom after its interplanetary journey.

Dust from interplanetary space is a treasure trove of information about the “stuff” between planets. Those little particles, many of them shed by comets as they regularly round the Sun, give us some tantalizing hints about what things were like early in the history of the solar system.

That’s why a group of scientists sent a mission out to sweep a little bit of cosmic dust into an aerogel “dust collector” and bring it back to Earth for study. They hope to get some insights into the materials that existed some 4.5 billion years ago, when the planets and comets formed. Comets themselves are bigger treasure troves, carrying ices and gases left over from the chaotic conditions in the early solar system. They also have dust particles embedded in between the ice crystals. That dust might have been shed by a long-dead star as it was blowing itself to smithereens as a supernova.

I always find these missions interesting. We can’t go out for ourselves and scoop up interplanetary dust, but we can send out these amazing pieces of technology to do it for us. And, each time we reach out, we touch a piece of cosmic history. Very cool!

For more cool thoughts about the Stardust mission, visit their web page.

Finally, if you’ve tuned in for more cosmic headlines from the AAS, here you go! Happy reading!

Public to look for dust grains in Stardust detectors.

There is More to Starlight than Meets the Eye/Milky Way Churns out Seven New Stars a Year.

Scientists Find Black Hole’s Point of No Return

Astronomers Use Spitzer Space Telescope to Challenge Brown Dwarf Models.

And just in time for this week’s launch of the New Horizons Mission:

The Discovery of Two New Satellites of Pluto.

News of the Cosmos

Orion from HST

As I’ve said before, I’m a sucker for the Orion Nebula. For me, nothing was sweeter than to see the latest HST image of this starbirth region unveiled on Wednesday before a packed press room. It’s stunning and the small version I’ve put up here doesn’t do it justice. To get the real scoop on this lovely image, you should click here and download the biggest copy of it your computer can handle. It’s THAT good.

I flew home on Wednesday night because I’m teaching a four-week class on communicating astronomy at Williams College and I needed to be back for Thursday’s class. The students and I spent part of our class time yesterday going through some of the many press releases I gathered at the AAS meeting. It gave them valuable insight into what science stories look like when they come out of the research fire hose, before they get into the press. Here’s a sampling for you to browse through—and I’ll post more in the next few days.

Astronomers Discover Fastest-Spinning Pulsar

NASA’s Spitzer Finds Possible Comet Dust Around Dead Star

Are Diamonds Responsible for Mysterious Red Light in the Galaxy?

Huge Superbubble of Gas Blowing Out of the Milky Way

Astronomers Spot the Orion Nebula’s Successor

Monster Black Holes Grow After Galactic Mergers

Happy Reading for now!

Exploring our Own Galaxy

Milky Way, Spitzer-style

One of the most fascinating aspects of this year’s meeting (for me anyway) is the continued exploration of the center of the Milky Way. I’m interested because right now I’m working on some material for the Griffith Observatory exhibits that tells people about our home galaxy. Of particular interest is the center of the galaxy, where we know there’s a supermassive black hole. But, it also turns out there is a whole lot of other activity happening there, making the core of the Milky Way one of the great “rediscoveries” of current astronomy.

Today (January 10) Spitzer Space Telescope unveiled a beautiful image of the central 900 light-years of the Milky Way, and the view gives us a peek at throngs of old stars, hot young stars, and clouds of gas that are lit by the glow from the nearby stellar youngsters.

The new stars are a bit of a surprise. For a long time, astronomers assumed that no new stars would form at the galactic center because it’s not a place where you would think the clouds of gas that coalesce into stars could “get it together” to make stars. It turns out that these massive young stars probably formed elsewhere and are spiraling into the center of the galaxy, their orbits warped by the gravitational force of the black hole. And, the image also shows newborn stars and the heavy clouds that give birth to stars, all lying more distant from the black hole.

The beauty of the Spitzer image is that it lets us look through the clouds of dust that hide the core of the Milky Way from our optical telescopes. Infrared light just cuts right through the dust, lifting the veil on the action at the heart of the galaxy.

Click on the link above to read more about the center of our galaxy, and view a larger version of the image above. It’s really quite beautiful!