An excited crowd awaits the start of Monday’s public lecture at the 216th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, “The Solar Dynamics Observatory: Your On-Orbit Eye on the Sun.” Project scientist W. Dean Pesnell’s entertaining talk easily made it worth the wait. Bill Andrews photo
Monday morning, I woke up bright and early, eager to begin attending the talks at the 216th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Miami. At first I thought I might have been the only one to do so, because the Welcoming Address was sparsely attended. Perhaps being on a Monday morning at 8 a.m. had something to do with it.
Undaunted, Terry Oswalt of the Florida Institute of Technology gave an interesting talk about reaching out to those “invisible astronomers,” people who got a degree in astronomy but whose titles don’t include the word “astronomer” or astronomy.” Oswalt stressed that they should feel welcome to join AAS, and current members should do a better job recruiting and including them.
By the end of this talk, attendance had spiked considerably. It was now time for Dennis Matson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to give his anticipated lecture on Saturn’s biggest moon, simply titled “Titan!” His talk spanned the moon’s discovery in 1655 through its Earth-based discoveries and Voyager data up to the more recent Cassini-Huygens mission (where Matson was a project scientist), part of which actually landed on that distant world. He called it “strangely earthlike” because of its thick atmosphere (1.5 times as thick as Earth’s at sea level) and its strikingly familiar topography. “We can point to places on the Earth where you can see similar morphology,” Matson said, and proceeded to show various slides doing just that; lakes, dunes, and plain old rocks on the saturnian satellite did indeed seem to fit in amidst similar pictures from Earth.
Next, I went to a presentation titled “Addressing Unconscious Bias,” which (as you might imagine) addressed the issues of unconscious bias in science, and particularly those relating to gender. Joan Schmelz of the University of Memphis, who is the chair of the AAS Committee on the Status of Women in Astronomy, made it clear that such behavior was not the same as discrimination, which is done with intent. Instead, she talked about the tendency of both men and women to downplay the contributions of females. Being married to a woman in science, I’ve often seen and heard of such behavior, so it was especially interesting to hear it addressed with scientific detail and with viable solutions to change people’s subconscious beliefs. (These solutions mostly consisted of various ways to work “proactively” to stop and prevent such behavior, the goal being to make the beliefs conscious, and thus avoidable.) After all, Schmelz said, “Excellence has no gender or race” and, in an ideal world, that would be reflected in the hiring and promotional practices of scientific institutions worldwide.
I actually got so caught up in the bias presentation that I forgot to leave early to try to catch some of the “Early Herschel Results” talk about the space observatory’s first findings. I’ll have to be more vigilant about time around here because so many of the lectures are so interesting.
Much of the rest of the day, I went to different talks that were pretty technical in nature. One by Marcia Neugebauer, titled “A Whole-Heliosphere View of the Solar Wind,” went into great detail about “the things that happen to the solar wind after it leaves the Sun.” Given that Neugebauer helped prove the solar wind exists, I believed her when she said, “The Sun is dreadfully complicated,” and didn’t feel bad if some of the information went a bit over my head.
Two more presentations scheduled back to back were titled “Cosmic Microwave Background Results and Future Prospects” and “WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.” Both again featured detailed analyses of the work and significance of each topic, but I found the latter easier to follow because of the personal stories and background tidbits relating to the spacecraft’s construction and launch from WISE principal investigator Edward L. Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles.
The day ended with two talks more tailored for the casual attendee. The first, “Preparing for ALMA,” discussed the upcoming Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, designed and run by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. While there was little newsworthy in the talk besides the call for proposals for early science, they got extra points by offering free food and drinks before the reception.
The second talk was the day’s public lecture, “The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO): Your On-Orbit Eye on the Sun,” and it was the only one all day intended for non-scientists. I actually saw several middle and high school-age children listening attentively so, by that measure alone, the talk was a success. W. Dean Pesnell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who is also the SDO project scientist, gave a rousing talk detailing the need for such a Sun-focused satellite and some of the early data it’s produced. Again, there wasn’t anything new to get excited about, but hearing someone as obviously passionate about the project as Pesnell crack jokes while explaining science more than made up for it. At one point he said, “I think we should all try to emulate – corona loops!” and invited the audience to stand and wave their arms to They Might Be Giants’ “Why does the Sun shine?” He was the only speaker I saw Monday who got shouts of “woo!” after his talk, and it was pretty clear why.
So that was my first day here at AAS! I’m glad it’s only a few more days, because I don’t know how much longer I could keep up this pace. For now, I can’t wait for another day of science and space so, as always, stay tuned for more blogs and tweets detailing it.
Related:
American Astronomical Society June meeting, Sunday recap