October 5th - Slooh your way to the stars

What's in an acronym? Paige Godfrey, Slooh's research director, gave us an overview of the services offered by this online observatory. As of today, Slooh provides access to six telescopes. The majority, 5, are located in the Canary Islands. These include their largest instrument with an aperture of 0.5 meters (20 inch). Another telescope in Chile gives access to the many interesting objects located in the southern sky, and a solar scope equipped with a narrow band H-alpha filter allows observations of the solar chromosphere. By locating their observatories under some of the darkest skies, they facilitate access to high quality observations to individuals who would live in areas that suffer from light pollution (all cities).

Individuals can access the data obtained by the cameras attached to Slooh's telescopes. Paige showed some examples of work done by members of their community, from processed images, mosaics and gifs, to discoveries of new comets. Since the processing of astronomical data can have a rather steep learning curve, they're developing materials to make it easy for anyone to get started.

Paige explained how these resources allow schools to incorporate observational astronomy into their curriculum, and they're launching a specific program, AstroLab, with the support of the National Science Foundation.

As an illustrative example of how Astronomy can help answer some of the most fundamental questions we've asked ourselves through history, Paige introduced the use of Drake's equation, a way to quantify the number of communicating civilizations in a given volume, and applied it to the set of stars visible in a typical image taken with one of Slooh's telescopes. Turns out vulcanians may be out there for real!

-- Jose Zorrilla (graduate student)

August 5: Practical Astronomy

While we're sad that summer is ending, this happily means the return of our lecture series! We started off on an unique and interesting note with Dr. M. Ryan Joung giving a talk on how astronomy can have practical uses or in his own words, "on the usefulness of 'useless' knowledge." Ryan used many examples to highlight the advances astronomy have spurred in other fields. Did you know that your GPS system uses quasars to calibrate the positions of its satellites in the sky? Or that they rely on Einstein's theories of special and general relativity for accuracy? Ryan also pointed out that taking and processing images have been the forte of astronomers for decades. Their work with CCDs have helped make modern cameras possible. Also, image processing techniques that astronomers use to study structures in galaxies are now successfully being used to identify cancer cells. While focusing on the practical aspect of astronomy, Ryan concluded by reminding us that astronomy is beautiful and we truly do it to understand our place in the universe.

After the lecture, we were lucky enough for the clouds to stay at bay and had our first public observing session of the new semester on the roof. Munier Salem, Josh Schroeder and Christine Simpson showed people the Moon, Saturn and Albireo. Meanwhile, Jana Grcevich led people on a "Tour of the Cosmos" using the 3D wall. Finally, some remained in the lecture hall to listen to presentations about JWST and Kepler from Lauren Corlies and Yuan Li. Overall, it was a great start to the semester.