the video below shows a 14 year old jennifer lin performing at TED in 2004. her whole performance is incredibly impressive, but the improv segment that begins at the 16:20 mark is amazing!
i havent been able to find any information about what she is doing now. does anyone know?
Monday, January 11, 2010
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Thursday, January 7, 2010
kepler finds 5 new exoplanets!
astronomers working with the kepler space telescope made a big announcement during the first full day of the 215th american astronomical meeting: they found 5 new planets orbiting around other stars during the kepler space telescope!! now we know of over 400 exosolar planets!!
you might remember the launch of kepler back in march.... the video was quite exciting i thought. the spacecraft had to travel to its proper orbit, then scientists performed several checks to make sure all the instruments were working properly, then data collection began. my first impressions when hearing the results of 5 new planets was that the number seemed a bit low. but these numbers come from only the first 6 weeks of data, and the team has not had any time yet to follow up the leads with observations from other telescopes. i imagine the kepler team will be announcing loads of new planets over the next few years!
brady quickly made a sixty symbols video about exoplanets and how we discover them, so watch as mike explains the process!
you might remember the launch of kepler back in march.... the video was quite exciting i thought. the spacecraft had to travel to its proper orbit, then scientists performed several checks to make sure all the instruments were working properly, then data collection began. my first impressions when hearing the results of 5 new planets was that the number seemed a bit low. but these numbers come from only the first 6 weeks of data, and the team has not had any time yet to follow up the leads with observations from other telescopes. i imagine the kepler team will be announcing loads of new planets over the next few years!
brady quickly made a sixty symbols video about exoplanets and how we discover them, so watch as mike explains the process!
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
from the earth to the universe
the people at chandra space telescope have teamed up with artist yann arthus-bertrand for a nice imaging project called "from the earth to the heavens." i'm always amazed at how similar shapes can appear in the very big and the very small. this project shows similarities between color images of earth and the cosmos.
the images on the right show the X-ray view of the cosmos from NASA's chandra space telescope. x-ray images show highly energetic, and usually violent phenomena in the universe. images on the left show the earth viewed from the air as captured in bertrand's beautiful "earth from above" project. enjoy!
click on each image set to read more information.
the images on the right show the X-ray view of the cosmos from NASA's chandra space telescope. x-ray images show highly energetic, and usually violent phenomena in the universe. images on the left show the earth viewed from the air as captured in bertrand's beautiful "earth from above" project. enjoy!
click on each image set to read more information.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
astronomy in the DC
i'm going to washington DC today for the 215th american astronomical society (AAS) meeting. this meeting will be HUGE, if not the biggest ever meeting of professional astronomers. its always great to see old friends who work in different areas of astronomy and the meeting provides a great opportunity to talk to people offering post-doc jobs that i'll likely be in the market for considering the UK's recently announced sad state of astronomical affairs.
if you follow twitter, i'll be posting when i can about the meeting and the interesting science that i hear. also, kelle at astro better suggests that anyone tweeting from the meeting should use the hashtag #aas215, but likely many people will use #aas.
the winter AAS meeting takes place every january and rotates between 4 US cities: seattle, DC, long beach, and austin. i've packed sufficient cold weather gear, i think, but i managed to lose one glove while in ohio :(
if you follow twitter, i'll be posting when i can about the meeting and the interesting science that i hear. also, kelle at astro better suggests that anyone tweeting from the meeting should use the hashtag #aas215, but likely many people will use #aas.
the winter AAS meeting takes place every january and rotates between 4 US cities: seattle, DC, long beach, and austin. i've packed sufficient cold weather gear, i think, but i managed to lose one glove while in ohio :(
Friday, January 1, 2010
where's wally?
i grew up in north america where one asks where's waldo? when searching for a tall man in a red and white striped shirt and hat, amid hundreds of other sketched people. but the world was first introduced to this character by martin hartford, who orginally asked where's wally? in the 1980s. i dont know why they changed the name to waldo for the north american release... i know several wally's but have never met a real life waldo. i wonder if thats because of the book?
anyway, we had a little art party this morning and made a painting called "where's what's-his-name?" can you find him? ;)
anyway, we had a little art party this morning and made a painting called "where's what's-his-name?" can you find him? ;)
wishing you happiness in the new decade
“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence”
- Aristotle
- Aristotle
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
a decorated tree
a decorated tree sits in the snow near arosa, switzerland.
this photo comes from the christmas 2009 collection at the big picture.
this photo comes from the christmas 2009 collection at the big picture.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
lunar eclipse on new years eve!
the last eclipse of 2009 will occur on new years eve! everyone around the world will see a full moon that night, and it will be a blue moon - the second full moon occurring in a month. look to the east, in the constellation gemini.
image from earth sky.
on new years eve, the earth will float almost directly between the sun and the moon, causing a partial lunar eclipse. the greatest eclipse occurs at 19:23 UT, when the edge of the moon passes thru the earth's shadow. this eclipse will be visible to people in europe, africa, asia, india, and some of australia - too bad americas! but you will have this view during the first few nights of 2010, as the moon passes close by mars on january 2nd!
the above map comes from sky and telescope, who state that "the Moon is plotted for North America; in Europe, move each Moon symbol a quarter for the way toward the one for the previous date."
image from earth sky.on new years eve, the earth will float almost directly between the sun and the moon, causing a partial lunar eclipse. the greatest eclipse occurs at 19:23 UT, when the edge of the moon passes thru the earth's shadow. this eclipse will be visible to people in europe, africa, asia, india, and some of australia - too bad americas! but you will have this view during the first few nights of 2010, as the moon passes close by mars on january 2nd!
the above map comes from sky and telescope, who state that "the Moon is plotted for North America; in Europe, move each Moon symbol a quarter for the way toward the one for the previous date."
Friday, December 25, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
home for the holidays
trips home are always exciting, enjoyable, energizing *and* exhausting! some observations and lessons i've learned from this venture to the US:
you cant carry christmas crackers in your luggage :(
i can say "pants" without feeling slightly embarrassed, but i've started to snicker to myself when i hear other people say it.
it takes approximately 3 hours for me to have the midwestern drawl return to my voice, although my family claims to hear my british accents.
this is the land of plentiful water fountains, trash cans, and eye contact with strangers.
i forgot that some time in the last few years i was given a strawberry shortcake ornament that smells just like my old doll!
there is a lot of space in this country. everything is so spread out!
despite the fact that its too cold to show my feet, i got a pedicure with my good friend and completely enjoyed it.
i should have bought everyone in my family an electric kettle for christmas. best innovation ever. why dont people use them in this country? i hadnt realized how reliant i've become on mine and i'm impatient with the watched pot.
i love waking up to see snow unexpectedly on the trees and ground.
it has been entirely too long since i've been sled riding!
i saw a car dressed up as a reindeer today.
i'll see my mom tomorrow and over one hundred other family members in the next two days!!!
you cant carry christmas crackers in your luggage :(
i can say "pants" without feeling slightly embarrassed, but i've started to snicker to myself when i hear other people say it.
it takes approximately 3 hours for me to have the midwestern drawl return to my voice, although my family claims to hear my british accents.
this is the land of plentiful water fountains, trash cans, and eye contact with strangers.i forgot that some time in the last few years i was given a strawberry shortcake ornament that smells just like my old doll!
there is a lot of space in this country. everything is so spread out!
despite the fact that its too cold to show my feet, i got a pedicure with my good friend and completely enjoyed it.
i should have bought everyone in my family an electric kettle for christmas. best innovation ever. why dont people use them in this country? i hadnt realized how reliant i've become on mine and i'm impatient with the watched pot.
i love waking up to see snow unexpectedly on the trees and ground.
it has been entirely too long since i've been sled riding!
i saw a car dressed up as a reindeer today.
i'll see my mom tomorrow and over one hundred other family members in the next two days!!!
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
the many faces of calvin and keldan
we were stuck inside, waiting for enough snow to fall to go sled riding. my nephew and i found creative inspiration from calvin and hobbes.
the many faces of calvin and keldan:
snow days are great!
the many faces of calvin and keldan:
snow days are great!
Sunday, December 20, 2009
carl sagan and the interstellar adventures of the voyager mission
i contributed today's podcast to the excellent 365 days of astronomy project! go have a listen to carl sagan and the interstellar adventures of the voyager missions, or read the trascript below! (i like that they published the trasnscipt in the same lowercase form that i submitted it!)
TRANSCRIPT:
hello everyone! i'm amanda bauer, a postdoctoral research fellow in astronomy at the university of Nottingham in england. today is december 20th, 2009, the 13th anniversary of astronomer carl sagan's death.
my first memory of carl sagan is from my first year as an undergraduate at the university of cincinnati. i was majoring in french and taking the university's only undergraduate astronomy course as my one science requirement. my professor played a few episodes of the COSMOS mini-series in class. eventhough this tv series was written in the late 1970s by carl sagan, ann druyan, and steven soter, the episodes made a memorable impression on me! i wondered why i had never seen anything explaining the universe so simply and understandably before. remember, this was back before youtube allowed us immediate access to all the good, and the bad, video information humans had to offer each other.
i'd like to mention an online video project i've been involved with at the university of nottingham, called sixty symbols. filmmaker brady haran, has worked in collaboration with scientists here to create 5-10 minute youtube videos about the various funny little letters and squiggles used by physicists and astronomers to explain concepts about the physical universe. you can find videos at http://www.sixtysymbols.com/.
so a couple months after first being exposed to the COSMOS tv series, the movie contact was released, proving to be a huge inspiration in my thoughts about the future. in fact, just a few weeks later, i decided to change my course and switch my college major to physics, dedicated to the idea of studying astronomy as much as i could! i only found out many years later that the movie contact was actually based on a novel by carl sagan!
My student days are long gone now, but I regularly hear colleagues claim that he was a huge influence in their decision to study astrophysics.
In addition to communicating astronomy and critical thinking to the public, i admire carl sagan because he actively applied science to public welfare, he was a skeptic who fought against pseudo science, he wrote about the virtues of cannabis under the pseuonymn "Mr. X," he won a pulitzer prize for his book "The Dragons of Eden," and he contributed hugely to the scientific discoveries about our solar system made by space probes sent out in the 1970s and 80s.
One project in particular seems to have left a lasting impression on human beings: the twin voyager missions. in 1977, NASA launched the voyager 1 and voyager 2 spacecraft, which were intended for 4 year missions to explore the outer regions of our solar system! Both voyagers have completely exceeded all expectations for their missions and continue to explore the the farthest reaches of our solar system!
traveling aboard each voyager spacecraft is an ambitious time capsule, intended to communicate the story of humity to any being that might find them! referred to as a 'golden record,' each time capsule is a phonographic 12-inch gold-plated copper disk. carl sagan chaired the committee that determined what message should be sent out into space on the voyager spacecrafts to portray the uniqueness of life on earth. imagine how exciting it must have felt to lead the group of people who designed, created, and found what images, symbols, and sounds to use to explain to a potential distant unknown creature... who we are, where we are, and *what* we are!
in the end, the team included 115 images, nature sounds of earth, 90 minutes of music, and spoken greetings from 55 different languages, among other things.
voyager 1 remains the most distant human made object we have sent to space, having passed the distance of pioneer 10 on february 17, 1998. As of November 20th, 2009, voyager 1 is over 111 times the farther from the sun than the earth! that's 111 astronomical units. thats more than 16,000 million kilometers and about 4 times as far from the sun as pluto's orbit!
these little chunks of synthetic machinery have been traveling away from earth for 32 years, and continue to travel outward, well beyond the confines of our solar system, making them the first spacecraft in interstellar space! the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. at its current speed (about 38,000 miles per hour!), it will take 56,000 years for voyager 1 to reach the next star!!
it will have lost power, and all interactive capabilities, long before that time. NASA scientists estimate that in 2025, the spacecraft will lose electrical power, because the Radio-isotope Thermo-electric Generators will run out of their plutonium fuel sources, due to natural radioactive decay. The voyagers will lose power well before they reach another star system.
but the good news is that the 'golden record' has a shelf life of 1 billion years!
it's actually impossible to predict the exact trajectory of the voyager spacecraft as they will get gravitationally bumped along their journeys. but they could pass nearby several thousands of stars during the next billion years, while the golden records will still be playable. and they will possibly pass out into intergalactic space! voyager 1 is traveling 35 degrees out of the ecliptic plane to the north. Voyager 2 is traveling 48 degrees out of the ecliptic plane to the south and will pass 4.3 light years (25 trillion miles) from Sirius, the brightest star in earth's night sky.
it's amazing how far these spacecraft will travel away from earth. and it reminds me just how incredible it is that the light from the distant galaxies that i study everyday, has traveled for over 10 billions years, across spacetime, without running into any obstacles, only to crash into the primary mirror of a telescope we happen to have sitting on the surface of earth. amazing!
relatively early on in the voyager missions, the voyager 1 spacecraft turned around to take an image of the earth on february 14, 1990. in that photo, earth appeared as a tiny dot, encompassing one single pixel of that entire image. carl sagan was inspired to call our home planet the "pale blue dot" based on that image, and i'd like to leave you with some of his words. thank you for listening:
"Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
TRANSCRIPT:
hello everyone! i'm amanda bauer, a postdoctoral research fellow in astronomy at the university of Nottingham in england. today is december 20th, 2009, the 13th anniversary of astronomer carl sagan's death.
my first memory of carl sagan is from my first year as an undergraduate at the university of cincinnati. i was majoring in french and taking the university's only undergraduate astronomy course as my one science requirement. my professor played a few episodes of the COSMOS mini-series in class. eventhough this tv series was written in the late 1970s by carl sagan, ann druyan, and steven soter, the episodes made a memorable impression on me! i wondered why i had never seen anything explaining the universe so simply and understandably before. remember, this was back before youtube allowed us immediate access to all the good, and the bad, video information humans had to offer each other.
i'd like to mention an online video project i've been involved with at the university of nottingham, called sixty symbols. filmmaker brady haran, has worked in collaboration with scientists here to create 5-10 minute youtube videos about the various funny little letters and squiggles used by physicists and astronomers to explain concepts about the physical universe. you can find videos at http://www.sixtysymbols.com/.
so a couple months after first being exposed to the COSMOS tv series, the movie contact was released, proving to be a huge inspiration in my thoughts about the future. in fact, just a few weeks later, i decided to change my course and switch my college major to physics, dedicated to the idea of studying astronomy as much as i could! i only found out many years later that the movie contact was actually based on a novel by carl sagan!
My student days are long gone now, but I regularly hear colleagues claim that he was a huge influence in their decision to study astrophysics.
In addition to communicating astronomy and critical thinking to the public, i admire carl sagan because he actively applied science to public welfare, he was a skeptic who fought against pseudo science, he wrote about the virtues of cannabis under the pseuonymn "Mr. X," he won a pulitzer prize for his book "The Dragons of Eden," and he contributed hugely to the scientific discoveries about our solar system made by space probes sent out in the 1970s and 80s.
One project in particular seems to have left a lasting impression on human beings: the twin voyager missions. in 1977, NASA launched the voyager 1 and voyager 2 spacecraft, which were intended for 4 year missions to explore the outer regions of our solar system! Both voyagers have completely exceeded all expectations for their missions and continue to explore the the farthest reaches of our solar system!
traveling aboard each voyager spacecraft is an ambitious time capsule, intended to communicate the story of humity to any being that might find them! referred to as a 'golden record,' each time capsule is a phonographic 12-inch gold-plated copper disk. carl sagan chaired the committee that determined what message should be sent out into space on the voyager spacecrafts to portray the uniqueness of life on earth. imagine how exciting it must have felt to lead the group of people who designed, created, and found what images, symbols, and sounds to use to explain to a potential distant unknown creature... who we are, where we are, and *what* we are!
in the end, the team included 115 images, nature sounds of earth, 90 minutes of music, and spoken greetings from 55 different languages, among other things.
voyager 1 remains the most distant human made object we have sent to space, having passed the distance of pioneer 10 on february 17, 1998. As of November 20th, 2009, voyager 1 is over 111 times the farther from the sun than the earth! that's 111 astronomical units. thats more than 16,000 million kilometers and about 4 times as far from the sun as pluto's orbit!
these little chunks of synthetic machinery have been traveling away from earth for 32 years, and continue to travel outward, well beyond the confines of our solar system, making them the first spacecraft in interstellar space! the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. at its current speed (about 38,000 miles per hour!), it will take 56,000 years for voyager 1 to reach the next star!!
it will have lost power, and all interactive capabilities, long before that time. NASA scientists estimate that in 2025, the spacecraft will lose electrical power, because the Radio-isotope Thermo-electric Generators will run out of their plutonium fuel sources, due to natural radioactive decay. The voyagers will lose power well before they reach another star system.
but the good news is that the 'golden record' has a shelf life of 1 billion years!
it's actually impossible to predict the exact trajectory of the voyager spacecraft as they will get gravitationally bumped along their journeys. but they could pass nearby several thousands of stars during the next billion years, while the golden records will still be playable. and they will possibly pass out into intergalactic space! voyager 1 is traveling 35 degrees out of the ecliptic plane to the north. Voyager 2 is traveling 48 degrees out of the ecliptic plane to the south and will pass 4.3 light years (25 trillion miles) from Sirius, the brightest star in earth's night sky.
it's amazing how far these spacecraft will travel away from earth. and it reminds me just how incredible it is that the light from the distant galaxies that i study everyday, has traveled for over 10 billions years, across spacetime, without running into any obstacles, only to crash into the primary mirror of a telescope we happen to have sitting on the surface of earth. amazing!
relatively early on in the voyager missions, the voyager 1 spacecraft turned around to take an image of the earth on february 14, 1990. in that photo, earth appeared as a tiny dot, encompassing one single pixel of that entire image. carl sagan was inspired to call our home planet the "pale blue dot" based on that image, and i'd like to leave you with some of his words. thank you for listening:
"Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Thursday, December 17, 2009
what english sounds like to italians
what english sounds like to italians, the MUSICAL! i dont know the origin or reason behind the video, the music, or the dancing - but i love them all!!!
found at cluster flock.
found at cluster flock.
i never open my eyes under water
i just dont like to. but this is a great photo from the big picture's 2009 in photos series.
2009 in photos: part 1, part 2, and part 3.
2009 in photos: part 1, part 2, and part 3.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
stonehenge
my mom came to england to visit last month, and we took a trip to stonehenge. its a gorgeous and mysterious place, strangely located right next to a road. many friends here tell me stories of how they could climb all over the stones as kids, but now they are blocked off so you can only walk around from a distance, listening to a recorded history of the place.
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