Blogs / Cosmic Variance

Here it is almost the end of March, and none of us has blogged about the International Year of Astronomy 2009.

There are a whole bunch of cool events of various sorts around the world. Ray Jayawardhana at Toronto started the year off with a great ad campaign on Toronto busses and elsewhere called Cool Cosmos. Here are a couple of examples:


Pretty cool to see that while you’re standing on a bus.

Later this week starts 100 hours of Astronomy, running April 2–5. The focus is a worldwide marathon of amateur astronomers watching the sky, culminating in a star party during the final 24 hours, which coincides with the 3rd annual International Sidewalk Astronomy night. If you have a telescope and know how to use it, get out there! And if you don’t, now’s your chance to find one! Astronomical observatories will be participating via Around the World in 80 Telescopes, which will be a live webcast starting on Mauna Kea (with Gemini, Subaru, UKIRT, Keck, CFHT, SMA, CSO all participating) and then heading west until it gets back around to Lick and Palomar 24 hours later. In addition to the webcast, you can also follow 100 Hours on twitter Impressively, in New York City, they managed to get the park lights turned off at 8pm this friday for their star party — great opportunity to see a dark(er) night in NYC!

In case 100 days isn’t enough, there is also a podcast called 365 days of astronomy, which has a daily podcast from a variety of sources and on a wide range of astronomy related topics.

Of course, there is also a blog, Cosmic Diary which includes bloggers from ESA, ESO, JAXA, and NASA, so you can hear about the life of professional astronomers all over. Check em out!

I’m sure I’ve missed some of the most interesting events, so feel free to leave them in the comments.

Google is now serving up more than a hundred years of photographs from Life Magazine. The pictures of the early days of astronomy are just spectacular. The archives contain images of many astronomers who were critical figures in the development of the field, but who have yet to have telescopes named after them. A large fraction of them also seemed to smoke pipes.

A huge hero of mine is Walter Baade. Baade was the guy who essentially took over observations at Mt Wilson during the blackouts of WWII. With the lights of Los Angeles snuffed out, and unable to serve in the military himself, he pushed the telescopes on Mt Wilson to their limits, and established the study of stellar populations in nearby galaxies.

There are some terrific pictures of Walter Adams working at Mt Wilson. In the picture below, he’s holding the telescope controls used for guiding. During an astronomical observation, you have to move the telescope to compensate for the earth’s rotation. Nowadays, your computer can take care of it by adjusting the position to keep a bright star at a fixed position on a CCD camera. Back then, you looked through a little spotting scope, and manually adjusted the telescope position to keep it pointed at the right part of the sky. If you let it drift, your image would be blurry. No pee breaks for you, Dr. Adams!

The guy kneeling in the figure below is Gerard Kuiper, working on a telescope at McDonald Observatory. He was a planetary astronomer, and the guy for whom the “Kuiper Belt” in the outer solar system was named, although Edgeworth probably deserved more credit for it. (Kuiper actually does have an airborne observatory named after him).

And you have to love this picture of Frank Drake, working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank West Virginia. You really can never have enough toggle switches. FYI, Drake is the guy behind the “Drake Equation”, used to estimate the likelihood of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations.

And finally, a wonderful overhead shot of the 100″ telescope at Mt. Wilson

The pictures above are a tiny fraction of the available pictures of working scientists. Cancel your afternoon appointments and dive in.