Today, we'll have a little grab-bag of items. Fill up your plate, it's an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord!
Telescopes without mountains
You don't have to be on a high mountaintop in Arizona, Hawaii or Chile to do astronomy. Although more and more colleges and universities are now equipped to run distant observatories from computer consoles on campus, there's nothing quite like the experience of actually working at the telescope itself, and plenty of campuses have or are getting telescopes nearby, wherever they may be, to offer hands-on experiences to their students -- and the capability of doing real research. It's a big sky out there, and among the billions and billions of celestial objects to observe, there are plenty of worthwhile observing programs that can be conducted from less-than-optimal sites.
So, here's one new example: Purdue University Calumet, in Indiana, just announced last week that they are proceeding, with the help of a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, to get a 20-inch advanced Ritchy-Chretien telescope, which will be set up in an observatory in a nearby state park. It will be equipped for robotic observations from campus, but also can be used by students from the university, as well as special field trips by local high schools, to get that firsthand experience.
“Purdue Calumet students will soon have the ability to learn the
science of astronomy through discovery from authentic data that they
themselves obtain with the robotic telescope," says Shawn Slavin, a professor of astronomy at the university.
Portal to the Universe
It sounds like a device from a science-fiction story, sort of like the "stargate" in 2001. But no, this is a project, organized as part of the International Year of Astronomy (next year), to provide a comprehensive guide to the astronomy related websites, news, clubs, observatories, image sources, and so on. At their website, they are inviting people to contribute links and information on any sources that fit this bill.
They plan to launch the site at the end of the year. It looks like it will be a useful resource for all of us, if it works out. Good luck to them, and I envite everyone to help out by contributing information on sites, groups and facilities that you are involved in or know about.
Fly your Thesis
The European Space Agency has just announced a new program, similar to NASA's longstanding Microgravity University, which I described here in an earlier post (and gave a specific example of in another post).
ESA's program is smaller in scope -- far fewer students will get to participate, and they'll have to wait much longer to do so. But it's also structured to foster more ambitious use of the opportunity. As with NASA's program, students are invited to propose experiments that can be flown aboard an airplane that provides brief periods of weightlessness by flying on a roller-coaster-like trajectory of parabolic hills and valleys.
The NASA program is aimed at undergraduates, and students generally propose experiments that may be part of a class project, or may just be an ad-hoc idea that a group of students come up with. ESA, on the other hand, is looking for graduate students who want to do work that will actually be part of their thesis research.
I'm delighted to see that European students will now have an opportunity to share in the kinds of experiences that American students have been able to take part in for more than a decade. And although fewer will get to take part, it's an admirable idea to use these opportunities to foster advanced level serious research. I look forward to seeing what kinds of projects will result.
Students in the Dark
Finally, a footnote to the coverage by my fellow bloggers Dave Mosher and Alan Dyer about the August 1 total solar eclipse.
I was very envious reading their accounts of their adventures watching the eclipse from two different airplanes. I've see four total eclipses in my life, and they are definitely one of the two number-one all time greatest categories of skywatching experiences (see Alan Dyer's posting on his rating system of the top celestial sights) I've ever had the pleasure of seeing (the other category that equals it being an all-sky auroral display, which I saw in spring of 1988). But it's been a long time since the last one I saw -- which was awesome and spectacular, on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii in 1991, surrounded by the world's leading telescopes.
Anyway, I just read an item about a couple of lucky undegraduates, Katie Dupre and Marcus Freeman, who got a chance to see this latest eclipse in the company of the world's leading eclipse researcher, Jay Pasachoff of Williams College. For Jay, this was his 47th eclipse! The lucky dog. They watched it near Novosibirsk, Siberia, and took part in research on the sun's inner corona, which can only be observed during total eclipses.
(Photos: Top, observatory sketch courtesy of Purdue University Calumet; Middle, zero-g plane courtesy of ESA; Bottom, solar eclipse photographed by Luc Viatour, licenced under the GNU free documentation license.)
Comments