LaunchPad Astronomy Workshop

Just in case you haven’t been able to tell from the sheer volume of information I posted, this week has been an amazing experience. I am sad to leave these astronomically lovely people. Tomorrow we all head our separate ways, a number of us to WorldCon where we will sit on a panel about Launchpad

Raw notes: Exoplanets.org is a catalog of stars with planets. It behooves you to check the catalog to see if the star you setting your story around has planets so that you are at least consistent with what is existing. This won’t be all we know in the future, but it’s a good place to

<!– @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } –> Raw notes: The environment out there is inherently strange to us. It is by definition not earthlike. When you are thrown out an airlock, you don’t explode. Odds are you won’t be at 14psi. 3 lbs of pressure per square

Computers in Astronomy, really? Computers have infiltrated almost everything. Something that frightens him is that they have computers in the cars and they all have to work together. The fact that he can get to the grocery store is a minor miracle. Computer Uses Controlling Equipment – In this context you might think of telescopes.

Raw notes plus two fiction bits from me. Jeffrey Lockwood was at a conference in New Mexico, funded by the Templeton Foundation. Doug Backoff, from SETI Institute. Doug was supposed to design a program from active SETI. Insteading of shotgunning the universe with messages we can now target them. Doug was working with visual artists

Hubble’s Law When we measure the distances to galaxies and their velocities, we find out that they are correlated. We take the spectrum of the galaxy and can tell distance. But because of the geometry of space/time things that are far away do not always look smaller. We can model what’s happening in the Hubble’s

I have a ton of information from today’s lectures, but I’m going to take it easy and just show you this picture that we ((Meaning the astronomers who were running the telescope at WIRO)) took. We went into the image lab and manipulated it today. Then tonight, we went onto the roof and looked at

The Milky Way. Almost everything we see in the night sky belongs to the Milky Way. Since we are inside, we only see the one band. From outside, our Milky Way might very look like our cosmic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. If you dare, read “Galaxy 666” Widely regarded as one of the worst SF

Check out Mike Brotherton’s the SF writer’s bookshelf. Full of excellent recommendations. Binary Star evolution is complicated and not easily condensed down to a single sequence. A lot of binary stars are far apart from each other. They will evolve as independent stars. But there’s a category of stars that are very close to each

We haven’t done the full color conversion yet, but I thought you’d like to see what the landscape looks like. The observatory is at 10,000 feet, so you can see an incredible spread of the landscape. WIRO

So they started by opening the dome to bring the ambient temperature of the observatory down.  Then they started chilling the instrumentation with liquid nitrogen.  Heat causes vibrations and chilling also allows a deeper well for photons. We all watched as they were moving the telescope into place — it makes all the right SF