Today’s the last day of the AAS meeting, and things are winding down. Yesterday was a busy one—I gave a poster presentation about using arts, poetry, literature, music, and science to teach astronomy in planetarium shows, and spent about 6 hours standing there talking with astronomers interested in how we do what we do. (If you want to read the paper, you can find it at Adventures in the Dome Trade on our Loch Ness Productions web site (it’s a PDF file)). Lots of good interactions and I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of colleagues from my days in the research world and several planetarians who stopped by!

One of the stories released at this meeting is about this lovely star birth region in one of the Milky Way Galaxy’s neighboring galaxies—the Small Magellanic Cloud. The view is so sharp that you can see this small population of infant stars perhaps only a few million years old, from a distance of 210,000 light-years! If you want to read more about it, click on the link above.
There was also a flurry of news about the recently launched SWIFT mission, which is out there observing gamma ray bursts, those mysterious pinpoint brightenings in gamma rays that are second only to the Big Bang in total energy output. They last a few milliseconds and likely are signals from the birth of another black hole in the distant reaches of the cosmos. For more information you can browse over to the Swift web page.
If you want to see more astronomy stories from this meeting, click on over to this page o’ links.