Astronomy.com blog : Daniel Pendick, outreach

August 2009 web extras for magazine subscribers

Karri Ferron — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Now that the August 2009 issue of Astronomy is in the mail or already in hand, we’ve updated Astronomy.com with our newest web extras to give subscribers exclusive complementary information to this special issue about our return to the Moon.

Take a sneak peek inside the August 2009 Astronomy magazine.

If you subscribe to Astronomy, make sure you’re registered with Astronomy.com so you can access these great extras.

Here are this issue's highlights:

Senior Editor Richard Talcott shares a NASA video animation preview of the Constellation program that will put humans back on lunar soil in “Return to the Moon.”

Associate Editor Daniel Pendick explores the opinions on NASA’s concept of “Moon first, then Mars” in “Should we go to the Moon first?”

Pendick also explains the uncertain effects of long-term exposure to space radiation and low gravity in “What are the health risks of a Mars mission?”

Senior Editor Michael E. Bakich offers an in-depth preview of the LRO and LCROSS missions that jointly launched June 18 in “NASA's next Moon mission.”

Pendick answers the “Ask Astro” question: “How warm does it get on Mars?”

And I’ve included a few more Q&As with Frank Shu and Joan Najita in “Astro Confidential: Extending the conversations.”

Of course, we’ve also posted “Bob Berman’s Strange Universe,” “Glenn Chaple’s Observing Basics,” “Stephen James O’Meara’s Secret Sky,” and “David Levy’s Evening Stars.” There are also August’s “The Sky this Month” and five “Ask Astro” questions.

Related:

Astronomy.com's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission page

Join the pulsar hunters and work from home

Daniel Pendick — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:13:00 GMT

“Wanted: a few hundred thousand computers with a little spare time on their hands.”

That’s the basic job qualification if you (and your personal computer) want to join Einstein@Home, a massive international project that uses donated personal computer time to crunch data for real scientists. The project has been going on for several years. This week, Einstein@Home announced it will begin to analyze data from a new source: the giant radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. It’s not too late to get into the action.

Einstein@Home, based at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) — a short drive down I-94 from Astronomy headquarters — and the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI) in Germany, is one of the world’s largest public volunteer distributed computing projects. Some 220,000 people in 209 countries have signed up for the project and donated time on their computers to analyzing data collected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and GEO 600 (in Sarstedt, Germany) for gravitational waves.

Powerful astro-events, like black-hole mergers, should generate ripples in the very fabric of space-time (gravitational waves). Einstein@Home uses the collective number-crunching power of thousands of computers to look for patterns of gravitational waves hiding in data captured by LIGO and GEO 600.

The researchers with Einstein@Home will be searching the Arecibo data for a special type of astronomical odd couple that generates gravitational waves: a spinning neutron star, or pulsar, orbiting a black hole. Both objects spring from the collapse of massive stars.

Previous methods could find such binaries in radio data if they orbited each other every 50 minutes or longer. Using the collective computing power of its volunteers, Einstein@Home will be able to find pairs with orbits as short as 11 minutes.

Many dedicated amateur astronomers contribute to various kinds of research, like the study of variable stars and discovering and tracking asteroids and supernovae. But if stargazing isn’t your thing, here’s a way to do some astronomy by essentially doing nothing.

Well, not exactly. You do have to sign up for Einstein@Home and install some software. The project team expects to spot at least a few new pulsars per year.

To find out how to participate, go to einstein.phys.uwm.edu.

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.