Astronomy, Astronomy, Astronomy
The 100 Hours of Astronomy events just continue on, and millions of people are enjoying and participating. How about you? Did you watch any of the very cool “Around the World in 80 Telescopes” vodcasts yesterday and today? I popped in throughout the day to see what’s shakin’ at observatories around (and above) the planet. The ‘casts are available from the web page link above.
Want to find out what’s happening near you? Check out the Google Map-enabled activity chart here. If your 100 Hours of Astronomy participation is limited to the armchair variety (and hey, there’s nothing like sitting in front of a warm, toasty screen enjoying astro-images), the European Southern Observatory has released two stunning images of galaxies to celebrate the events. Both of these galaxies belong to the Sculptor Group of galaxies tha tlie about 7.5 million light-years away. In NGC 55, astronomers studying planetary nebulae–the end-products of the evolution of stars like our Sun — were able to use their data to determine the distance to this galaxy. They also think that this galaxy might be joining together with another galaxy, NGC 300. For NGC 7793, astronomers are intrigued by the chaotic spiral structure it shows. What causes the chaos? Good question. Perhaps an interaction with another galaxy?
These are just two of the many images that observatories are releasing for 100 Hours of Astronomy. I’ll try to track some more down and post links. It’s not just observatories releasing images though — folks who are participating in astronomy events around the world are posting images on the 100 Hours photo gallery. Here are a few of my favorites.
It’s really quite wonderful to see people get so excited about reclaiming the night skies through such activities as 100 Hours and all the events connected to the International Year of Astronomy. It’s been a great year of astronomy so far, and there’s a LOT more to come!
Now, if some news media would deign to mention this wonderful year of outreach and sky fascination… come on CNN and BEEB and others… let’s have a little astronomy on your pages. People need some awe and wonder in their news, too.
The failure of them MainStreamMedia in general to react to the flood of “100 Hours” press releases from IAU, ESO, ESA, NASA, you name it, is puzzling indeed – could it be that the IYA (which got mentioned a lot in its early weeks) is “old news” already, after just three months?
Even the buzz in the twittersphere (if that’s a rough measure of interest in the general and esp. the scitech-savvy public) is underwhelming: a search for keywords basically brings up the ‘usual suspects’. And the 3500 viewers at most that the 24-hours webcast got – it that anything to crow about in an International Year of Astronomy?
Many questions – but where are the answers to guide us for the remaining 3/4 of the IYA (and the remaining years of that Universe)? There will be a major evaluation of the IYA in 2010, based mainly on media analysis, I’ve been told: Shouldn’t there be an analysis of the situation already starting April 6th …?
Hello.
There is a YouTube video Group related to 100HA where all the participant groups are encouraged to post their videos.
http://www.youtube.com/group/starparties
Clear Skies!