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)

March 2: Grumpy Bert

On Saturday night, graduate student Munier Salem and Director of Outreach Summer Ash helped kick off the opening of a spectacular photography exhibit at Grumpy Bert in Brooklyn. The exhibition entitled "The Universe in Color" runs through the end of the month and features 22 large format images of the Universe taken by astrophotographer (and physician) Robert Gendler.

Munier opened the evening with an informal talk on light and how astronomers make use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum in order to learn as much as possible about the Universe. Then the 40+ audience members asked some very astute questions ranging from the expansion of the Universe to extraterrestrial life. The event culminated in a lively reception which allowed everyone to examine Gendler's amazing works up close and personal.

Additional photos from the event can be found here.