Astronomy.com blog : Daniel Pendick, deep sky

World’s strongest astronomer!

Daniel Pendick — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:43:00 GMT

When you see a photo like this, you stop and look. And you wonder: What’s that guy’s story? Who is this kilt-wearing fellow with the big stone ball on his shoulder? And what does this have to do with astronomy?

Let me introduce you to Mike Sidonio, former competitor for the title of World’s Strongest Man and award-winning astrophotographer. (In case you’re wondering, the ball is sandstone and weighs 337 pounds [153 kilograms]).

I’ve been working on a new department for Astronomy that will pull together many interesting and notable bits of news and information related to astronomy and space science. One of my colleagues here, Valerie Penton, brought Sidonio’s striking Atlas-like pose to my attention.

Sidonio shared his story as we e-mailed back and forth. First off, he’s Australian. He lives just outside of Canberra. In his own words:

“I first got interested in astronomy as young boy and bought my first scope, a Tasco 4.5” Newtonian, when I got my first job at 15. I was very active in astronomy and particularly astrophotography in the 80s, building cold cameras and other interesting astrophotographic equipment. During the 90s I discovered serious weight training and undertook a quest to become the World’s Strongest Man. I got close but being completely drug free prevented me from going all the way.”

Without using steroids, Sidonio says he attained his best condition in 2001. The 6’1” athlete weighed 300 pounds, with 20-inch arms, 33-inch thighs, and a 56-inch chest. He set a world record for the “farmer’s carry,” toting two weighted steel compressed gas cylinders suitcase-style, one in each hand. In this event, he carried 353 pounds (160 kg) in each hand 167 feet (51 meters).

A quick tour of Mike’s numerous galleries on PBase, an image sharing site, left me pretty impressed. I especially like the ones where he compares some amazing Hubble Space Telescope shot to one of his, side by side. You can sample 60 galleries and 641 images on PBase.

Above: Sidonio's world-record smashing "farmer's walk"

Above: Sidonio set up for a night of imaging.

Above: Sidonio's favorite shot — Centaurus A (NGC 5128)

Here comes Galaxy Zoo 2

Daniel Pendick — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:03:00 GMT

It’s not every day you get a mysterious new celestial object named after you. But that’s what happened to Hanny van Arkel (pictured below), a primary schoolteacher from The Netherlands. And all she had to do was point and click.

Van Arkel discovered a glowing green gaseous object, which scientists dubbed “Hanny’s Voorwerp” (Dutch for “Hanny’s object,” pictured at right). It was an early success from the Galaxy Zoo project, one of the biggest-ever collaborations between scientists and citizens. Participants are volunteers, like van Arkel, who have used the web site www.galaxyzoo.org (now located at zoo1.galazyzoo.org) to analyze celestial objects from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

The project started up in 2007. In 2008, Galaxy Zoo produced results with real scientific value. Now here comes Galaxy Zoo 2, which debuts today (February 16) at www.galaxyzoo.org.

In the first phase of Galaxy Zoo, project scientists chose 1 million galaxy images from the SDSS database and asked people to decide whether a galaxy was spiral or elliptical and which way it was rotating. The new Galaxy Zoo asks them to look in more detail at 250,000 of the brightest galaxies and spot strange and unusual characteristics.

Galaxy Zoo hoped to recruit 30,000 volunteers. But after only a year, more than 150,000 people from all over the world had signed up. In the last 18 months, armchair astronomers have submitted 80 million different classifications of 1 million objects. Some single-handedly notched tens of thousands of contributions.

Ultimately, the project’s power lies in the human mind’s natural software. “The human brain is actually better than a computer at pattern-recognition tasks like this,” says Kevin Schawinski, an astronomer at Yale University who helped create Galaxy Zoo.

Dozens of research projects are in progress using Galaxy Zoo data. One can only wonder what kind of strange cosmic voorwerps await discovery by the next crop of Hanny van Arkels.

A second helping of astro-hype

Daniel Pendick — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:52:00 GMT

Have you heard the news? Astronomers have observed the early phase of an exploding star. It’s 2008d, the “supernova caught in the act.”

If you are in the science media, you can’t help having heard about it. For days, we’ve been in the midst of a blitz that would make the Luftwaffe envious. Fortunately, the supernova discoverers are firing press releases at us, not dropping bombs.

At one point yesterday, I almost reached for my spam filter. As is often the case, multiple scientists had a hand in the discovery. And the home institution of each and every one thought it prudent to mass-distribute a press release. The basic information was the same, with the addition of extra detail about the various scientists. I counter 11 separate press releases floating around, including one in Chinese from the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.

As if that weren’t enough, today at noon EST, Princeton University — home base for astronomer Alicia Soderberg, who made the discovery — held a live teleconference. For all the hoopla, you’d think somebody at Princeton invented a better mousetrap.

My gut reaction to this is it’s just a bit much. At the press briefing earlier today, Soderberg spoke of a “thrilling and historic event.” And the SN2008d blitz comes fast on the heels of NASA’s campaign to promote G1.9+03, the youngest Milky Way supernova remnant known. It exploded in 1868.

NASA announced a press conference 1 week ahead of time, pitching it as the “discovery of an object in our galaxy astronomers have been hunting for more than 50 years.”

Um ... sort of. In keeping with estimates of the rate of star birth and death in the galaxy, we should see a certain number of supernova remnants in the Milky Way. The discovery of G1.9+03 supports current estimates.
But the wording in the NASA release suggested astronomers had been doggedly pursuing a particular object — not just any supernova. This feels like a bait and switch maneuver.

Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s wonderful that astronomers have discovered a 140-year-old supernova in the Milky Way and observed a star in the act of exploding. The latter is going to thrill supernova theorists and computer modelers. It also provides the science media a story with wide public appeal.

But let’s not overdo it. Until more substantial findings dribble out in the journals, this is just another biggest/loudest/fastest/firstest/youngest/oldest science discovery headline story. Sending out eleven press releases doesn’t change that. And don’t forget that overselling a story can have consequences — the infamous “boy who cried wolf” effect.

Here’s a lesser-known fact about SN2008d: It’s not news. On February 5, the astronomers posted their discovery on the arXiv server, a place on the Internet where scientists disseminate their research before official publication.

Ron Cowan, the enterprising astronomy editor of Science News, reads arXiv server. He posted a story about SN2008d on March 5, noting that the scientists would not comment on the research.

Why? Because they had submitted their report to the British journal Nature. And Nature enforces a strict embargo — an impolite person might call it a gag order — forbidding scientists to discuss their own research with reporters. Many of us strongly suspect part of the motivation for the gag order is to exert maximum control over the media process, to make the biggest splash possible — and hopefully leave its rival, the journal Science, all wet. (The paper on SN2008d appears in tomorrow’s issue of Nature, by the way.)

The media blitz by Princeton is also an attempt to shape and control the media. Fortunately for them, we are willing and enthusiastic participants most of the time — as long as they send us cool color images.

The script plays out the same way every time. Announce a major discovery without releasing any images. Then schedule a dramatic moment, like a press conference. That way, the story goes out on the wires at about the same time all over the world, creating the illusion this story is “breaking news.” But anyone who follows the arXiv server knows it is not quite the case.