Category Archives: gift ideas

astronomy, gift ideas

Gifting the Universe: Part IV

2 Comments

 Giving the Gift of Science Research for the Holidays

Give Science!

A couple of months ago I wrote about a startup group called Uwingu. Their mission is to help crowd-fund important science and science education research and training that isn’t getting enough (or any) funding now. The group has been beta-testing a great idea to raise money: naming exoplanets. According to my friend Alan Stern, who is one of the brains behind Uwingu, the group’s original Indiegogo fundraising campaign plus the smaller donations from the planet-naming app have been incredibly successful. “We’ve had more than thirty-thousand site visits and two thousand in small purchases,” he said. Add to that the $79,000+ that was raised in the original campaign and Stern said that there’s more than enough to start funding some science.

“In their visits to the site, people told us they thought the idea of nominating names for planets is cool, but they also wanted to know who we were going to fund,” Alan said. “I’m pleased to announce that we will be funding the SETI Institute, Astronomers Without Borders, the Galileo Telescope Teachers Project, the National Space Society,and the Multiethnic Introduction To Engineering (MITE) Academic Boot Camp at Purdue University.

.”

Uwingu has added more ways to participate on their site, including a chance for people to buy gift cards that their friends, relatives, classrooms, youth groups and many others can use to nominate planet names for worlds around distant stars. If this appeals to you, check it out! It’s a unique idea and it truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

Stargazing Electronically

I’m a junkie for astronomy programs, particularly for mobile devices. I’ve got several commercially written desktop planetariums such as TheSky (which is a great gift for the stargazer in your life). Recently I’ve been playing with apps, specifically for the iPhone (and can be found in the Apple store). Some are free – such as Moon, by CDV Concepts (it also has a paid “Pro” version — search for it in the app store). It gives you the Moon’s rise and set times, distance to the Moon, and other useful data.

Another one I’ve been using lately is Starmap, which is a handy planetarium for both iPad and iPhone. I’ve had the free version for some time, but there are also paid versions available that add to the first-rate experience for both beginning skygazers and experienced pros. It’s a nice way to take an electronic star chart out with you for skygazing. (Full Disclosure: since finding Starmap and installing it on my iPhone, I’ve been in touch with the developer, and I’m now working on on some new additions for the app, which should be available next year.)

I’ve also been pleased to see such apps as Mobile Observatory come out. I got a chance to see it on someone’s Android during a recent trip and it looks like a very nice “keeper” for folks with devices that say “Droid” to them when they power up.

Desktop planetarium applications are also great ways to share astronomy. As I mentioned, I like to use TheSky from Software Bisque. I also have Stellarium, which is a free, open-source program that runs under a variety of computer flavors. I use it to make star charts for The Astronomer’s Universe, the program I do each month for Astrocast.TV.  There is a mobile version of Stellarium that runs on Nokia N900 and Symbian^3 phones,  as well as Androids. There is an iPhone version, but apparently Apple is not offering it in the U.S. store. Folks outside the U.S. can probably get it.

There are many good apps and programs out there, more than I can write about here. These are a few to get you started, but just put “astronomy apps” in your search engine and you’ll find more of them than you can shake a telescope at!

 

astronomy, books, geodesium, gift ideas, Loch Ness Productions, music

Gifting the Universe, Part III

Leave a comment

 Music of the Cosmos

Mark C. Petersen performing a live GEODESIUM concert at the Boston Hayden Planetarium. Courtesy Loch Ness Productions.

Does the universe have a soundtrack? You bet it does! And I know the guy who composes the best cosmic soundtrack music around. I’m married to him. His name is Mark C. Petersen, and he composes under the nom de plume GEODESIUM. Mark has spent much of his career creating music that evokes and teaches about the cosmos. He also founded the company that we both work for, Loch Ness Productions (we specialize in cosmically creative content).

If you’ve ever visited a planetarium or listened to Music from the Hearts of Space, or seen some of the productions on Space.com, you may have heard some of Mark’s music. It gives listeners an idea of what it’s like to be exploring the planets, drifting through nebulae, gallivanting through galaxies, and simply enjoying the glittering loveliness of a clear dark night here on Earth.

Mark got started many years ago doing music for soundtracks at the Fiske planetarium at the University of Colorado (we got married under the dome at Fiske). People would come up after the shows and ask where they could get the music they heard, and so he pressed his first album, called “Geodesium”, which is also the name he composes under.

Now he’s got eleven albums of GEODESIUM space music available through our own Web site, as well as CDBaby, iTunes, Amazon, Rhapsody, Spotify, and many other online retailers. I like them all, but I do have my favorates, including A Gentle Rain of Starlight, Stella Novus, West of the Galaxy, and Fourth Universe. A more recent album is an exploration into the rockin’ side of space music for a video-game type show called SpacePark360. He’s also got one called ‘Tis the Season that evokes the timeless traditions that many people celebrate at this time of the year. It’s a space music journey through holiday traditions. So, whether you’re looking to give music that is especially spacey or you want something a little bit rockin’ or even something to enjoy while sipping a warm holiday drink, check out Mark’s music!

Books, Books, Books

Find The Constellations, by H.A. Rey, is a perennial favorite.

People often ask me what astronomy books they should give as holiday gifts. I’ll start here with a couple of stargazing books that are by far my favorites for beginners. The first is H.A. Rey’s Find the Constellations (Houghton Mifflin), a beginner’s book for little (and even not-so-little) stargazers. It’s a great way to get the youngest observers out there and looking up!

Rey also has a book for older stargazers called The Stars: A New Way to See Them. He takes the ideas he introduced in Find the Constellations and expands on them, adding more constellations in, plus discussions about how the seasons work, and distant objects such as supernovae. Both of the H.A. Rey books introduce a system of easy-to-recognize stick figures for constellation. They’re the figures I grew up seeing in the sky and you (or whoever you give the book to) will learn to love them, too.

Terence Dickenson’s well-known book, courtesy Firefly Books.

Another favorite is Nightwatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe (Firefly Books). This one gets a lot of use when I’m doing shows or, as I’m doing now, writing an astronomy book. It’s a great reference when I want to look up when something is in the sky, and I often use it just before running outside to look at the stars. It’s spiral-bound, which is a big plus in my mind because that means if you take it outside to consult during stargazing, it lies FLAT.

A look at Navajo star legends and cosmology. Courtesy Rio Nuevo Publishers.

If you’re interested in exploring at how other cultures view the sky, I just ran across a lovely book called Sharing the Skies (Rio Nuevo Publishers) It’s written by David Begay and Nancy C. Maryboy, who both bring their cultural viewpoint and their science backgrounds to their work. I first got interested in other astronomies when I did a show for the St. Louis Science Center and we used the Collinsville Mounds as a steppingstone to the stars.

My reference work at that time included a great book by Ray Williamson called Living the Sky: The Cosmos of the American Indian (University of Oklahoma Press). It was published in 1987, but remains a wonderful resource to learn about how other cultures view the sky. And, it’s still in print!

Further along the road of exploring cultural interpretations in astronomy, you can’t go wrong with any of the books on the subject by Dr. E.C. Krupp, director of Griffith Observatory. I have SkyWatchers, Shamans & Kings and Echoes of the Ancient Skies (which is available through Griffith’s online gift shop) and both are first-rate. All these books are available at your favorite bookstores and online retailers (Amazon, Barnes and Noble), and as well as Tattered Cover, Powell’s, and maybe your local bookstores, too!