Monthly Archives: August 2008

education

Online Science Learning

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Astronomy Through Teh Intarwebs

The javelin event at the Interplanetary Olympics.

We were talking tonight at dinner about distance learning being the wave of the future. A couple of friends of mine are pursuing legitimate online degrees in astronomy, which I think is certainly the ultimate distance learning!  These cost some money, and of course, some time.  But, they fulfill a new take on an old saying, “if you can’t go to the mountain (or the university), bring it to you!”  And the Internet/Web is the delivery mechanism.

But what if you don’t want the degree; just the knowledge?  It turns out there are classes at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, through a program called MITOPENCOURSEWARE that are free (with the catch being that you don’t get a degree), but you aren’t paying anything more than your time. (You can donate, however, to help keep the coursework online.)  So, I browsed the course catalog and found such things as Introduction to Astronomy and The Solar System. You simply download the course materials and follow the directions and you’re learning what the MIT kids do!  If you  need the basics, they have math and physics and so forth. I think it would be a great place to brush up on those long-forgotten calc and physics problems!

david dunlap observatory, General

Astronomy’s Loss

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Is Apparently a Developer’s Gain in Toronto

The historic David Dunlap Observatory in Toronto, Ontario (Canada), has been sold to Metrus Development, Inc., which has already started drilling holes in the dome to affix huge padlocks to the doors and windows. It’s not clear what Metrus plans to do with the facility, but it’s likely the telescope (which I’ve been told is still working), is headed for the dustheaps of history, prematurely. Or, perhaps it’ll end up in a museum somewhere. The land is probably headed for development.

How did this happen? It seems that the University of Toronto decided that the observatory, which has been quite productive, was to be sold and the proceeds used to buy new equipment for the university’s department of astronomy. The last employees were let go in July and astronomer Tom Bolton (the first astronomer to discover a black hole) told to get his research materials out. It’s a sad end for a famous site. I first heard of it when I wrote to an astronomer there (Helen Sawyer Hogg) for permission to use an image of a star cluster that she had taken using DDO. It had a fascinating history and a wonderful telescope.

From what I could tell in my reading about DDO, the observatory was being used to do long-term surveys and, due to Bolton’s efforts, light pollution from nearby subdivisions had been mitigated quite a bit. Yet, the university claimed that the observatory couldn’t do “world-class” research due to light pollution.  I find that assertion a little bit hard to believe, given the advances in technology that many observatories around the world use to increase their sensitivity. Perhaps some of the University’s decision-makers could have talked to observatories in California and elsewhere that are doing good work despite far worse light pollution than what was threatening DDO.

But, perhaps somebody in the department had their eye on something new and shiny, and selling off DDO was the only way to get it. These things do happen, particularly in the name of “progress.” Still, it seems to me that a heritage site such as the David Dunlap Observatory, which educated generations of astronomers and made huge contributions to astronomy, deserved better treatment than it got. (You can read more about the DDO’s plight at SavetheDDO.)