te recuerdo amanda

victor jara.



read how i was first introduced to victor jara and his soul-soothing song, te recuerdo amanda.

colbert as an astrophysicist?

all i'm saying, monsieur colbert, is that i could be your personal astrophysicist! could it get any better? you wouldnt have to go to school for n (>10) years!



it's just what your show needs.... and as it happens, i'm currently looking for productive employment! in fact, i could be the astronomy correspondent for both the colbert report and the daily show! and i wouldnt be bogged down with the responsibility of running an entire planetarium, like neil degrasse tyson!

call me.

(please!)

total lunar eclipse this wednesday

hope for clear skies this wednesday evening... especially if you live in the americas... and wake up early with clear-sky hopes if you're in western europe or western africa! people in these locations on earth will see the moon pass thru the earth's shadow, creating a total lunar eclipse!



if you're in austin, then enjoy the free public lecture at 7:30 and then head outside to view the eclipse!

we wont get another total lunar eclipse from the americas until night of december 20–21, 2010... so enjoy this one if the weather permits!

50 years of space science

the first 50 years of adventures in space have taught us many lessons about the universe, technology, and humanity. it's amazing to think that while we've been sending things far away from earth for 50 years now, we've only been sending things far away from earth for 50 years! the voyager spacecrafts recently celebrated their 30th year traveling to deep space! my personal favorite experiment involved sending the little rover robots to mars.


space.com offers a nice retrospective of our 50 years in space including many interesting multi-media features, anecdotes, and quizzes to test your knowledge!

UT will celebrate our accomplishments in space with an exciting event this week! wednesday night, february 20th at 7:30pm, UT is hosting a free public lecture by macarthur fellowship ("genius award") recipient, chris chyba, entitled...

"the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe"

cool!



conveniently, there's also a total lunar eclipse wednesday night, reaching totality just as the talk ends! i'll probably go to RLM or painter hall to check out the orange moon thru a telescope... everyone is of course invited!

hallelujah

leonard cohen's song, hallelujah, has to be one of the most beautiful songs of all time... although strangely enough, not so much when he performs it! i love his deep voice, but other people have really brought this often-covered song to life.

here's a band from my hometown, over the rhine. her voice harbors such a deep passion and perfects the necessary emotion to perform this song. i also love the piano.



my all-time favorite version is absolutely the one by jeff buckley. the images in this video are interesting, but a bit distracting from the beauty of the song.

the moon and mars

the half-full, first quarter moon sits to the west of the pleiades star cluster tonight. the waxing moon approaches mars and passes very close by the bright orange planet for the next several nights. friday night provides the closest approach this month, as shown below.




the moon slowly fills with sunlight over the next week, and will pass right thru earth's shadow, what we call a total lunar eclipse, next wednesday night! stay tuned!

kissing

why do we kiss?

kissing is fun, for sure, but it doesnt directly benefit us in an evolutionary sense, so why do we do it? what initiated the regular act of kissing thousands and thousands (or millions?) of years ago? and why is that some percentage (~10%) of humans don't kiss?


the scientific term for kissing is osculation (scientists sure have a way at wiping out the romance even from one of the most romantic acts possible, dont they?!). there was an interesting article this week in scientific american describing new research as to why we kiss. one thought is that kissing evolved from when primate mothers chewed food up for their young and then fed them mouth-to-mouth. i can see how that tender and originally necessary act, developed into something that could occur to show affection, even when sustenance wasnt involved.


another thing i learned from the article is the human lips "enjoy slimmest layer of skin on the human body." our lips are also very densely populated with sensory neurons and so are especially sensitive to slight touches. hm. this gives one reason why kissing is so enjoyable, but doesnt describe the benefit of kissing, in the sense of giving a reproductive advantage.

the punchline is that kissing remains as big a mystery as the question of why we fall in love. but for me.... this mystery is a good thing!

sagan all my love

brilliance!




from ironic sans via bad astronomy.

banana wall

a potassium-packed installation by Stefan Sagmeister.

i heart chocolate

ze frank cleverly sums up valentine's day....



a quick ode to valentine's day from jay grandin that leaves me... speechless...

a quick trip to chile!

i had a nice, though exhausting, short trip to chile!

the ocean water was so cold that i didnt swim the entire 8 months i was in chile last year.... but this warm summertime sunday, we played in the waves!






it was good to see again my british sister that i met chile! ;)




i took a bus trip into the grape-vine-lined valley, to the small town of vicuna...




... where i explored the bug museum!






la serena always provides entertaining night life!


the chilean cuisine provided particularly delightful adventures this trip!

redshift and the distance to distant galaxies

this weekend i gave a public talk entitled a long time ago, in galaxies far, far away. it was great fun to prepare and present a talk with pretty pictures after giving so many technical talks lately! based on the responses i received, i thought i would share a popular segment with everyone here!


in order to talk about galaxies far, far away, you have to know how far away the galaxies are! it turns out that determining the distance to astronomical objects is not a trivial matter! for very distant galaxies, the best way to determine their distance is by looking at their spectra in order to determine their "look-back time" or their "redshift."

to do this, we point a telescope at a galaxy, collect the photons of light coming from the stars in that galaxy, and then send those photons through a complicated prism system, in order to see the galaxy's rainbow!


the different colors of the rainbow correspond to different wavelengths of light.


each galaxy has a unique rainbow fingerprint ("spectrum"), although some general properties are universal. the simple rainbow fingerprint below shows a nearby galaxy that has several lines, produced by hydrogen, in its spectrum. the existence of these lines and the relative spacing between them are well understood by physics and quantum mechanics.


since light has a finite speed that it travels (the speed of light is 300,000 km/sec or 670,000,000 mph!), it takes light from a distant galaxy some amount of time to travel through space to us! when we determine how long the light has been traveling thru space, we know how far away the galaxy was when it released the photons of light that eventually landed on our lucky telescope! this time is called the galaxy's "look-back time" and goes from very small up to 13.7 billion years (the age of the universe).

sounds simple enough, but how can we determine this??

the key piece of information is that the universe is expanding!! as the light from a galaxy innocently travels thru space for a couple billion years, space itself is expanding! as the light wave travels, space expands and the wavelength of light gets stretched out with space!


the original wavelength of a photon of light when it left the galaxy, is stretched out as it travels thru space so that it is a longer wavelength by the time it reaches us and lands on our telescope mirror. each of the lines from hydrogen are shifted to longer wavelengths!


we compare the spectrum of a distant galaxy to a very nearby one to see how far a particular line has shifted. the farther the shift, the farther away the galaxy, the earlier in the history of the universe the light was produced inside the galaxy! from the amount of shift of a line in a galaxy's spectrum, we get the galaxy's redshift which is a number between zero and something very large (greater than 100). note that what i've described is the galaxy's "cosmological redshift" (as opposed to a doppler redshift).

mathematically, the redshift, z, is equal to the ratio of the wavelength of light that we observe to the emitted wavelength of light as it was when it left the home galaxy, minus one.


a galaxy with a redshift of one (z=1), emitted the light we observe about 8 billion years ago, when the universe was about 6 billion years old!


here's an example of a real two-dimensional galaxy spectrum, showing the intensity of various lines of hydrogen in addition to oxygen and sulfur.

dew bug

stunningly beautiful example of refraction, using a brilliant target!


see more of martin amm's photography: here

carnival of space - #40

hop over to the orbiting frog blog, for the 40th installment of the carnival of space!

upside down orion!

i'm thrilled to be under southern skies again!

in general, when i walk outside of a roofed-structure at night, i look up immediately to see what stars and planets are out, in order to get acquainted with my relative time and location... just 4 days ago, i eagerly awaited the southern summer sun to set so i could look up to see orion upside down (!) and the southern cross above my head… reminding me how far around the other side of the earth i’ve come for this job interview!


i survived my interview, but i have to say it was the most intense one i've had! wow.... i was relieved when it ended, but of course i circled all my responses over and over in my head afterwards, wondering about their "correctness." i tried to be as honest as i could be without getting bogged down with worries about what the "right" answer was they might be expecting. i think i succeeded at this point, but their detailed questions have given me interesting things to ponder for the last couple days!

i leave this evening to head back to the northern hemisphere. i'm excited to discuss the universe a long time ago, in galaxies far, far away!

darwinian valentine's day

did anyone get up early enough to see the conjunction of venus and jupiter? i almost did, but not quite. let me know if you got any good pictures!

this afternoon, i'm leaving on a jetplane for the spanish-speaking wonderland... chile! i'm extremely excited to be heading back to my home of most of 2007!! the main purpose of the trip is for a job interview (think good thoughts for me!), but i also plan to visit old friends, drive to the mystical valley, drink some pisco sours, eat an empanada or four, hopefully listen to fantastic folk music, and lounge a bit on the beach!


i might not be able to post much while traveling, so i leave you with a challenge... enter the darwin valentine's day card contest being held by the skepchicks!!! i think this is a hilarious idea, and i'm feeling inspired to try to come up with something even half as clever as the one they share...


good luck!

space flight: challenges always re-enter

this week we're reminded to learn from our mistakes... by not forgetting them! three major NASA-related events that have helped shape our image of space exploration, all occured in various years during this week. for a more developed summary, see professor astronomy's blog. i'll just mention the two events that i remember from personal experience.

1) on January 28, 1986, the shuttle Challenger exploded. i was young at the time, but i have a very vivid memory of the moment. my class was privileged to watch the launch live and we were all very excited! i sat on the floor, next to my best friend jessica, looking up at the TV. the image of the liftoff and the arc made by the smoke in the air is very vivid in my mind. then the line grew into an unexplainably big puff ball while white streaks shot out to the sides.


the explosion seemed surreal and confusing. my young mind's first thought was "that's odd. i don't think that was supposed to happen." it was ultimately the reaction of the teachers in the room that made me understand the seriousness of the situation. i remember deciding at that moment that i did NOT want to be an astronaut!


2) On February 1, 2003 i was in west texas observing at the mcdonald observatory. i was there for an 8-night observing run on the 2.7m telescope and became excited when i heard the shuttle columbia would pass over texas on its way to landing in florida! depending on the shuttle's final descent path, i would be able to see it crossing the sky, low to the north, early in the morning. i followed NASA's liftoff webpage all night to track columbia in its orbit, in anticipation of seeing the shuttle! while i finished up some morning calibration exposures, i stood out on the catwalk that surrounds the telescope.... looking off to the north.

NASA estimated that the shuttle would pass by between 7:30 and 8am (central time, of course), so i watched from about 7:30 until 8:15am (it was february and cold on the mountain top!). The sun had risen by 8am and since the shuttle would have crossed the sky very low on the horizon, i suspected that i would not see it at all. so i finished the night's observing a little disappointed having not seen the shuttle. i closed down the telescope, walked across the road to my dorm room and went straight to sleep.

it wasnt until i woke up around 4pm that i found all the other astronomers gathered around the TV watching CNN. i was surprised, to say the least, when i heard the news that columbia had broken apart during re-entry! most of the visiting astronomers and observatory staff there were very emotional about the event. this created a somber atmosphere as we discussed the effect of the 3000 degree heat generated during re-entry and our speculations as to what could have happened. as the shock slowly wore off and the reality set in, i reflected on my thoughts that early morning as i waited to see the shuttle.

i think professor astronomy sums them up, and provides excellent insight into these events... so i will leave you with a quote from his blog:

It is important to remember these people and accidents. These men and women willingly put their lives at risk to explore space, bravery that deserves recognition. But also, each of these accidents may have been preventable. A string of human errors and cultural issues led to each accident. These errors are much easier to see in retrospect than they were ahead of time, and so we should be careful in assigning blame to freely. Yet we can and must learn from these mistakes to protect future lives; to ignore these lessons would be an unforgivable failure.

Finally, we should all recognize that more lives will be lost in the future. Space travel is extraordinarily dangerous. As private companies also begin to open space to civilians, we must accept that there will be accidents and lives lost, and most of these will probably be due to human error. Let's just hope that those errors are due to exploration and humankind's pushing of the envelope, and not due to our failure to learn from our history.

when imagination becomes reality

here is an amazing project where Yeon Doo Jung, a korean photographer, takes drawings by children and turns them into reality by staging real photoshoots! that must be such a cool feeling as a kid to have so much effort going into creating your personal design! see more at wonderland 2005...




i found this via neat-o-rama

carnival o space - #39

this week's collection of astronomy musings has been collected at sean welton's visual astronomy.

around christmas, many people asked me about what kind of telescope they should buy for their backyard sky watching. assuming the successful purchase of a telescope, i refer you to sean's excellent list of ten essential astronomy accessories. i find especially useful: a good chair, star charts, a red flashlight, warm clothes and various eye pieces. one thing that doesnt make his top ten, but i definitely enjoy when possible, is a tasty beverage kept warm or cold in a good thermos! enjoy!

space food sticks

"lasting energy to feel alive."


from: serious eats

a long time ago, in galaxies far, far away...

would you, could you be in austin, texas on friday, feb. 8th?? if so, then read on!

you're invited to a public astronomy lecture i'm giving for the austin astronomical society in a couple weeks! At 7:30pm on the evening of friday, february 8th, i'll be talking for 45 minutes about galaxy evolution and answering questions afterwards. No prior astronomy knowledge is necessary... enthusiasm is encouraged! :)

Title: "A long time ago in galaxies far, far, away..."

Topic: Galaxies found in the distant, early universe look and behave differently from those in our local universe. In this presentation, I describe triumphs and tribulations towards our understanding of these differences, by highlighting some fundamental insights into the current questions of galaxy evolution.

Treatise: Astronomy always fascinated Amanda as a child, but she never thought that it could be a feasible career. As an undergraduate at the University of Cincinnati, she studied French for a year before recognizing her true fascination with the Universe. She changed her major to physics, having no real idea of what she was getting herself into! Ten years later, she is preparing to graduate from the University of Texas at Austin with her PhD in Astronomy, still not entirely sure of what the Universe has in store for her, but excited to find out!


The meeting location is in RLM Room 4.102 (The Wheeler Lecture Hall), in the Robert Lee Moore Building, on the University of Texas at Austin campus at the southeast corner of Dean Keeton (26th) and Speedway. more info here:

http://www.austinastro.org/meetings.html

map and parking:
http://www.austinastro.org/meetings-map.gif

see you there!!
amanda

jupiter and venus under your finger!

this friday morning... feb 1, 2008... get up early and go outside! the very bright "morning star," venus, and the very large and bright planet, jupiter, are creeping closer to each other these days! they will be closest this friday morning with a separation of less than one degree!.... that means they will both be covered by one finger when you hold it out at arms length! here are a couple maps to help you find you way. look to the southeast at dawn....




the morning light should provide a perfect photographic setting! here's an image i saw at NASA's science site taken by Thierry Demange in france on january 23.

powers of ten - galaxy song

the first video is the fabulous "powers of ten" video produced by architects charles and ray eames in 1977. this 10 minute feature shows the scale of the universe, from a cell in our body, to a galaxy out in space!

"Eventually, everything connects." — Charles Eames



this couple minute video shows the "powers of ten" movie while playing the brilliant "galaxy song" by eric idle. just as carl sagan's COSMOS has stood up the test of time, Paul Kohlmiller tells us that the galaxy song does too!



here's the original version of the "galaxy song", shown in the monty python classic film... "the meaning of life".

NASA "meatball" logo

i just read the print on the back of a NASA sticker i picked up at the AAS meeting in austin. i learned that the NASA insignia was designed in 1959 and has been referred to as the "meatball" since 1975!? the sphere represents a planet, the stars represent space, the red chevron wing represents aeronautics (the latest design in hypersonic wings at the time the logo was developed), and the spacecraft orbiting around the wing represents space travel.


i spy with my little eye, three stars close together in a line....

i still dont quite understand how the word "meatball" fits into this insignia, but i give huge props to NASA anyway, for giving out some great stuff this year at AAS! the calendar i picked up is fantastic, the image changing COBE/WMAP postcard is cool, and i love my little black cleat bag! thanks NASA! (where is this kind of positive press for NASA in the popular media?)

focus

what i strive for,
what i sometimes lack.

my excuse for many things,
my determination for others.

what motivates my intuition,
what hinders my instincts.

i'm driven by curiosity,
i'm delighted by discovery.

satisfaction is my motive,
happiness is my goal.

our moon and mercury

congratulations! everyone fared very well on this week's mercury or the moon game! without further hesitation... the bottom image in the game was mercury and the top was the moon! now its time to take a closer look at their similarities and differences between these two neighbors of ours.

take another guess....




could you tell the difference between them in the new images above? this time i think it's a bit easier because only the second image... the moon... reveals the sharp-edged darker regions called maria. the low-laying maria are flat planes that appear smooth in the image because they have fewer crater impacts.

there are a few maria visible on mercury, but they are small and not so defined. the striking brightness variations on mercury's surface might be caused by different things.


some people identify familiar objects on the surface of the moon based on the patterns resulting from the strong contrast between the dark maria, and the bright hilly highlands. i've never been able to find the man in the moon on my own. i think this phenomenon is somewhat subjective since people tend to find faces among patterns easily, but also because i'm always so distracted by the realization that the moon is a big huge rock flying around us in gigantic, predictable circles... that my eyes tend to not seek familiarity!

an obvious similarity between our two neighbors is their dense covering of impact craters. they both have large craters that are covered with smaller, younger craters. the fact that we can still see these craters tells us that neither object experiences strong storms caused by thick atmospheres, or lingering geologic activity. it appears to me from closer inspection of their surfaces, that mercury has more little tiny craters than the moon.


there are a couple very large impact sites seen on the moon. two of these seem much bigger than the largest impacts on the surface of mercury. the moon's largest impact craters also have large radial white lines shooting from them, caused by debris material thrown out at impact. i see some of these lines on mercury, but they are much fainter. i think this can be explained by mercury's higher surface gravity.

the planet mercury is larger than our moon. i can apply newton's law of universal gravitation to determine the relative strengths the gravitational forces one would feel on the surface of each orb...

if i'm sitting on mercury, then i say my mass is M1 in the equation above, mercury is M2 and the radius of mercury is r. I do the same thing for the moon and take the ratio of their F_. i discover that i weigh a little over 2 times more on mercury than i would on the moon! higher surface gravity means that the impacts on mercury did not throw debris as far as they did on our moon, and we see weaker white streaks coming out from each crater! it's interesting though that the brightest lines on mercury seem to radiate from very small impact craters.

what other differences do you see?