50th Anniversary of Explorer 1

Fifty years ago today, the US launched its first satellite, Explorer 1. JPL, a major NASA center in Pasadena, CA, put up a cool website with lots of pictures, audio, video, etc. to commemorate the event, available here.

And don't forget, tomorrow morning before dawn Venus and Jupiter will be very close to each other on the sky.

New Email List

If you are interested in received a HTML email whenever I post something on this site, please click here. I apologize to any of you who had tried to sign up my now-defuct Google email-list, but - embarrassingly enough - I was never able to set that up properly.

Thank you very much for your interest and please, feel free to email or post comments / questions / criticism below.

Convergence of Venus and Jupiter

this Friday morning - on the sky, that is. For more info, go to this NASA science article, which has a neat description on how our eyes work as well. Sounds like it'll be a gorgeous sight.

Asteroid Flyby

Courtesy of spaceweather.com:
"Asteroid 2007 TU24 is flying past Earth this week at a distance of only 334,000 miles (1.4 lunar distances). NASA radars tracking the asteroid confirm that there is no danger of a collision, but it will be close enough for amateur astronomers to photograph through mid-sized backyard telescopes. At closest approach on Jan. 29th, the asteroid will glide through the constellations Andromeda and Cassiopeia glowing like a 10th magnitude star. Visit http://spaceweather.com for celestial coordinates and a low-resolution radar image of the approaching rock."

If any of you take pictures of this asteroid and would like to post them online, I'd be more than host them for you (give you full credit, of course.)

January 23rd Radio Show...

... is now online as well. Sorry for the delay, but I had a scare involving static electricity zapping the sound component of my laptop's motherboard. This show was also an all-news show - I wasn't lying when I said that tons of press releases are issued at the Winter Meeting's of the AAS - and I discussed:

• News: NASA chastises astronomers for lobbying for money to be devoted to Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), a future satellite designed to image planets orbiting other stars, claiming that it will lead to the cancellation and/or delay or more important astronomical missions; congratulations to Dr. Maxim Kontsevich (IHES - France), Dr. Edward Witten (IAS - Princeton, NJ), and Dr. Rashid Sunyaev (MPI - Germany) for being awarded the Crafoord Prize; NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) - an infrared detector mounted in the nose of a 747 jet (really!) - completes next round of testing; European Space Agency (ESA) starts developing BepiColombo, a joint Japanese/European mission to Mercury.
• Radio Astronomy: The Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA)- the highest resolution astronomical facility in existence - announce new measurements of the distance to star forming regions and faraway galaxies, the spin of nearby galaxy M33, and confirms that the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way is at the exact center of the Milky Way; the Greenbank Telescope (GBT) discovers that a nearby, massive cloud of hydrogen is going to collide with the Milky Way in 40 million years, as well as discovers 5 new clouds of hydrogen around nearby galaxy M81; timing measurements made by the Arecibo radio telescope indicate that neutron stars can have masses higher than previously thought; Arecibo detects presence of ingredients of amino acids in faraway galaxy - Arp 220.
• Tuesday Morning Astronomer - an Astronomy perspective on the Astronomy news bulletin in Gregg Easterbook's ESPN Page 2 Column Tuesday Morning Quarterback: From Pluto, the Sun would very much look like a normal star to a person, which is a very sobering thought on just how big the universe is. Also, I forgot to mention that his statement that planets move slower on the sky than stars is wrong. Planets move faster on the sky than stars, and I actually think the word "planet" comes from the Greek word for "wanderer."
• Calendar of upcoming events in the Greater New York Area.
• Galaxy Formation: Astronomers discover galaxies in the early universe believed to be the building blocks of galaxy like our own Milky Way; large elliptical galaxies today may have indeed been formed in the early universe, consistent with detections of such galaxies in the distant past; Hubble detects clusters of young stars created in gas ejected from galaxies in which are merging / colliding.

Hope you enjoy and, as always, please email or leave any questions and feedback below. Thank you very much for listening.

Yosi

January 16th radio show...

is now online. This was an all-news program, thanks to the flood of press releases issued at this year's Winter Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, an annual, huge conference with literally hundreds of Astronomers in attendance. With the exception of meetings of the International Astronomical Union, these meetings are by far the largest gathering of Astronomers in the world - with hundreds of talks and posters being presented. I was only to go through about half of all the press releases generated at this event on this show - which is a small fraction of all the results presented, and talked about:

• News: Registration deadline for JPL's Space History Educator Conference is January 22nd (today!), go here for more info; NASA's annual moonbuggy race to be helf on April 4-5 at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, registration deadline is February 1st, and go to http://moonbuggy.msfc.nasa.gov for more info; NASA releases a new Astronomy book called "Touch the Invisibly Sky" intended for the blind and hard of seeing; new version of Google Sky is released; initial release of data from the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey; NASA announces detail of next Hubble servicing mission, which will include installation of new scientific instruments and hopefully repairs of broken ones; NASA's Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter undergoing final round of testing before launch.
• Solar System: Ulysses flies over the North Pole of the Sun just as the next solar cycle begins; Messenger completes first flyby past Mercury - required to slow it down so it can eventually orbit this planet starting in 2011; Harvard astronomers and geoscientists report that Earth about as low mass of a planet which could sustain life, since if it had any less mass it would not have plate tectonics; lowest frequency radar echo from Moon ever was detected, offering new insight to what is just below the Lunar surface.
• Milky Way: Evidence that a peculiar object orbiting a very low mass star (brown dwarf 2M1207A, which has a mass only 25 times that of Jupiter) is a rock just smaller than Saturn creating by the collision and merging of two planetisimals - rocky objects which are believed to form the building blocks of planets; gas and dust disks - similar to the ones where planets are believed to form - detected around two stars (BP Piscium and TYCHO 4144 329 2) much older than expected to still have such structures; Milky Way might contain hundreds of black holes which have been kicked out of globular clusters - very old, very dense clusters of stars; "light echo" predicted from hot gas falling into rapidly spinning black holes.
• Calendar of upcoming science events in the greater New York City / Poughkeepsie area.
• Result of the week: New result from observation done using the Integral satellite that gamma-rays - extremely high energy light particles - in the plane of the Milky Way associated with positrons (anti-electrons, particles with the same mass but opposite change than electrons) is not centered on the Galactic Center but slightly offset which strongly suggests that the positrons are not produced by annihilating dark matter but by some Astronomical source, most likely in the disk of very hot gas surrounding black holes which have a star orbiting them.

Hope you enjoy, and - as always - if you have any questions or concerns please email me or leave a comment below. Any feedback is always appreciated.

Thanks a lot for listening,
Yosi

Interview with Tom Rankin

of Poughkeepsie's own Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association on what to look for when buying an amateur astronomy telescope is available here. Hope you enjoy, and if you have any questions, or problems listening to this, please email me or leave them below. Thank you.

January 9th radio show...

... is finally online and available here. Sorry for the technical snafus during this program, but I was thankfully able to remove most of them before posting the radio show here. On this program, I discussed:

• News: A model for the Mid-InfraRed Instrument that will go on the James Webb Space Telescope is ready for testing, the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager which will go on NASA's upcoming Solar Dynamics Observatory now ready for final pre-launch testing, Charles Simonyi and Bill Gates together donate $30 million to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, Deep Impact spacecraft flies by Earth on New Year's Eve for last course correction, initial results released by the COROT satellite - which has measured very precisely the brightness of 12000 stars at the same time every second for over a year.
• Solar System: Detection of sunspot heralds the beginning of Solar Cycle 24, large cyclones discovered at both the North and South pole of Saturn, new estimate of the mass of Saturn's rings imply that they are old - though much debate continues on this subject.
• Milky Way: Planet discovered orbiting a very young star - TW Hydrae, dust disk surrounding star HR 4796A is rich in organic molecules believed to have been present on the Earth when our Solar System was very young, pulsar-like X-ray pulses discovered from a white dwarf for the first time.
• Extragalactic: Lack of gravitational waves detected from a short Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) which probably occurred in the nearby Andromeda Galaxy (M31) implies it was not caused by the merger of neutron stars or black holes - though is unlike to be the result of aliens as jokingly theorized by Gregg Easterbrook in his weekly ESPN column.
• Calendar
• Interview with Tom Rankin of the Mid-Hudson Astronomy Association on what to look for when purchasing an amateur telescope.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or complaints, please email me or leave them below. Hope you enjoy -- Yosi

Link fixed

Sorry for the delay, but I finally fixed the link to my interview with Michael Bank posted below. Stupid typo on my part. Again, my deepest apologies, and hope you enjoy it. Also, please let me know if any other links are broken, either via email or by leaving comments below.

Thank you very much for your patience.

Moonbuggy Race!

NASA is hosting its 15th Annual Moonbuggy race on April 4-5 at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville. The event is open to the public, and the registration deadline is February 1st. For more information, go to http://moonbuggy.msfc.nasa.gov. And if any of you go, please let me know. I'd love to hear stories about it, and would be more than happy to post pictures (credited to you, of course) if you want to share.

New Events...

posted on the calendar, available here. Hope you enjoy!

Space History Educator Conference

Courtesy of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA:

Space History Educator Conference
January 26-27 at JPL in Pasadena, California.


Celebrate the 50th anniversary of America's entry into space with JPL's Explorer 1, launched January 31, 1958. We will use the opportunity to look back at the start of space science and the origins of the space race. We will have a look at what did, and what did not, happen during humanity's first fifty years in space with Dr. Erik Conway, JPL's Chief Historian, and other speakers.


Registration deadline is Tuesday, January 22.


Conference Details are at http://education.jpl.nasa.gov/events/space20071009.html

January 2nd radio show...

... is now online, and ready for download. Since the week between Christmas and New Year's is always a slow one, this show was a little special - the usual news segment was followed by the local Astronomical calendar, as always, but installed of following it up with more news or an interview I played about 30 minutes of vaguely astronomy-related music I brought from / found in the WVKR archive.

Also, do people prefer if I put up a synopsis of each show, or just a link and general description? Please let me know below, or by emailing me. Thanks a lot, and hope you enjoy -- Yosi

Quadrantid Meteor Shower

Courtesy of spaceweather.com:

"Earth is about to pass through a stream of dusty debris from near-Earth asteroid 2003 EH1, producing the annual Quadrantid meteor shower. Forecasters expect a brief but intense peak of 50+ meteors per hour over Earth's northern hemisphere sometime between 0200 UTC and 0700 UTC on Friday morning, Jan. 4th. (Subtract 5 hours to convert UTC to EST.) The timing favors observers in the eastern USA, Europe and western parts of Asia. Winter storms frequently hide this shower from observers on the ground. To avoid such problems, a team of astronomers led by Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute plan to fly a plane above the clouds where they can train their cameras on the Quadrantids. Their data may reveal whether asteroid 2003 EH1 is the fragment of a broken-apart comet. Visit http://spaceweather.com for sky maps and more information."

Happy New Year, and good luck meteor hunting! -- Yosi