LaunchPad Astronomy Workshop

So we’re all at the Wyoming InfraRed Observatory.  The telescope is huge and beautiful.  Sadly, it’s cloudy.  It’s been beautiful all week and the clouds came in as we were driving up.  So, we’re all sitting and standing around in the computer room while the two grad students who are up here are explaining what […]

The spectra of stars. We know stars are warm objects with black body spectrum. It’s a continuous spectrum with warm lines on top. From Kirchoff’s law you know that means a cold gas sitting in front of a warm body. The Balmer Thermoter which is a basic way to measure the temperature of stars. [color

In writing when someone talk about an amateur writer, it’s often a pejorative term. In the astronomy world, that’s not the case at all. The word amateur comes from the word “amore” to love. So amateur astronomers are people who love astronomy. That’s a distinction between the writing world and the astronomy world that he

We just had a practical lab with Jim Verley dealing with spectrometry. It was fairly low tech, mostly to give us an understanding of how this stuff works.  He started off by talking about how other sciences, like biology or chemistry, you get an item and take it back to the lab and do experiments

Fermi problems You start by making reasonable guesses, like to answer, “How many piano tuners are in Chicago,” you make a guess about how many people have pianos. Then you figure how many pianos a man could tune in day. How much does a cow weigh? Start with something you already know. Like, Jerry knows

Your traditional view of astronomy is optical. Think of the center as being red center with old stars, but in infrared the view is flipped around. It’s a way to reorient your wavelength orientation. Introduction to Dust What is dust? Is it just very small asteroids/meteorites. There’s some periodicity to when major extinctions occur. We

Keen!  We just played with a Infrared Camera and it’s so cool.  Someone walking through the room leaves visible foot prints. In a perfectly clear window, a person looking in infrared could not see through it.  It’s so much fun.

More raw notes.  Let me know if this gets dull. 99.99999% of what we know about the universe comes from understanding light. He’ll talk about the tools, because astronomy is a technology driven science. Theorists can come up with theories, but until we have the tool to test it, it’s just a theory. Light and

Same disclaimer. Raw notes. Coherence is random. Until we have FTL most stories about humans in space will happen in our own solar system. Even when we send people out, it’s probably a good idea to understand the local real estate. (Jerry still includes Pluto as a planet. “Poor thing, it gets no respect.”) Mnemonic