Recently in Astronomy Category

An annotated overview of 98 astronomy applications for smart phones and tablets has been published in the on-line journal "Astronomy Education Review." Compiled by Andrew Fraknoi (Foothill College), the list features a brief description and a direct URL for each app.

The listing includes a variety of apps for displaying and explaining the sky above you (some using the GPS function in your device); a series of astronomical clocks, calculators, and calendars; sky catalogs and observing planners; planet atlases and globes; citizens science tools and image displays; a directory of astronomy clubs in the U.S.; and even a graphic simulator for making galaxies collide. A number of the apps are free, and others cost just a dollar or two. A brief list of articles featuring astronomy app reviews is also included.

You can access the article free of charge at: http://aer.aas.org/resource/1/aerscz/v10/i1/p010302_s1

Astronomy Education Review is on-line journal about astronomy education and outreach, published by the American Astronomical Society, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this fall. You can find it at: http://aer.aas.org (Via Planetary Science Newsletter)

The Virtual Observatory and its Benefits for Amateur Astronomers

"The contemporary astronomical instruments have been producing the unprecedented amount of data. The largest part of this "data avalanche" is being produced by deep all-sky surveys yielding terabytes of raw data per night. Such a great data volumes can hardly even been reduced by automatic pipelines running on supercomputer grids but it is impossible to exploit fully their content by a small group of professional astronomers in the interested research teams. New tools for collaborative work with heterogeneous data sets spread over distant servers are being developed in the framework of the Virtual Observatory (VO)."

Total Lunar Eclipse brings SkySafari to Android

"The iOS versions of SkySafari have been downloaded more than 900,000 times from the iTunes Store. SkySafari has won multiple awards, including a MacWorld 2010 Best-of-Show, Sky & Telescope Magazine's Hot Product award for 2012, and an endorsement by Astronomers Without Borders. SkySafari is the only mobile astronomy app which can correctly reproduce this December's total lunar eclipse, or any other. SkySafari's Plus and Pro versions have the largest database of any mobile astronomy app, and are the only ones which can control backyard telescopes."

The DAME/VO-Neural Infrastructure: an Integrated Data Mining System Support for the Science Community

"The DAME/VONeural project, run jointly by the University Federico II, INAF (National Institute of Astrophysics) Astronomical Observatories of Napoli and the California Institute of Technology, aims at creating a single, sustainable, distributed e-infrastructure for data mining and exploration in massive data sets, to be offered to the astronomical (but not only) community as a web application. The framework makes use of distributed computing environments (e.g. S.Co.P.E.) and matches the international IVOA standards and requirements."

DAME: A Distributed Data Mining & Exploration Framework within the Virtual Observatory

"Originally designed to deal with astrophysical use cases, where first scientific application examples have demonstrated its effectiveness, the DAME Suite results as a multi-disciplinary platform-independent tool perfectly compliant with modern KDD (Knowledge Discovery in Databases) requirements and Information & Communication Technology trends."

Scientists study the 'galaxy zoo' using Google Maps and thousands of volunteers, FECYT

"More than two thirds of spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way, display a central bar that can extend for thousands of light years. These colossal elongated structures are made up of collections of stars and dark matter which are held together by gravity. Now a team of researchers from Europe and the USA have measured the bar length of some 5000 galaxies with the help of amateur astronomers. The most precise results (those obtained for 3150 galaxies) have been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal."

Constructing a Galactic coordinate system based on near-infrared and radio catalogs

"The definition of the Galactic coordinate system was announced by the IAU Sub-Commission 33b on behalf of the IAU in 1958. An unrigorous transformation was adopted by the Hipparcos group to transform the Galactic coordinate system from the FK4-based B1950.0 system to the FK5-based J2000.0 system or to the International Celestial Reference System (ICRS). For more than 50 years the definition of the Galactic coordinate system has remained unchanged from this IAU1958 version. On the basis of deep and all-sky catalogs, the position of the Galactic plane can be revised and updated definitions of the Galactic coordinate systems can be proposed."

How Will Astronomy Archives Survive The Data Tsunami?

"Astronomy is already awash with data: currently 1 PB (petabyte) of public data is electronically accessible, and this volume is growing at 0.5 PB per year. The availability of this data has already transformed research in astronomy, and the STScI (Space Telescope Science Institute) now reports that more papers are published with archived data sets than with newly acquired data. This growth in data size and anticipated usage will accelerate in the coming few years as new projects such as the LSST (Large Synoptic Survey Telescope), ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array), and SKA (Square Kilometer Array) move into operation."

Seeking a New Name for Transformed Scientific Icon - The Very Large Array

"The most famous radio telescope in the world is about to get a new name. The Very Large Array, known around the world, isn't what it used to be. The iconic radio telescope, known around the world through movies, documentaries, music videos, newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements, textbooks, and thousands of scientific papers, is nearing the completion of an amazing transformation. More than a decade of effort has replaced the VLA's original, 1970s-vintage electronics with modern, state-of-the-art equipment. And so it's time, the Observatory has decided, to give this transformed scientific facility a new name to reflect its new capabilities."

Planets Found in Decade-Old Hubble Data

"In a painstaking re-analysis of Hubble Space Telescope images from 1998, astronomers have found visual evidence for two extrasolar planets that went undetected back then. Finding these hidden gems in the Hubble archive gives astronomers an invaluable time machine for comparing much earlier planet orbital motion data to more recent observations. It also demonstrates a novel approach for planet hunting in archival Hubble data."

Keith's note: The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) has recently release a large number of standards designed to structure the creation of a "vrtual observatory" that spans efforts by many individuals and organzations across the world. According to their website: "The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) was formed in June 2002 with a mission to "facilitate the international coordination and collaboration necessary for the development and deployment of the tools, systems and organizational structures necessary to enable the international utilization of astronomical archives as an integrated and interoperating virtual observatory." The IVOA now comprises 19 VO programs from Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Europe, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States and inter-governmental organizations (ESA and ESO). Membership is open to other national and international programs according to the IVOA Guidelines for Participation."

A large number of updated standards were posted today at astro-ph (listed below):

SPACE brings Project 'Paridhi' on Equinox Day

"Starting on 23rd September on the Autumnal Equinox Day, Project 'Paridhi' initially will span across all the Asian countries in this Equinox. There will be a participation from India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, China and Russia. The observation base will be extended to the whole globe by Winter Solstice in December 2011. This project is a showcase for proving that science can be best learnt by doing. On this day, SPACE has invited school students to witness the Autumn Equinox as it is one of the best occasions for all of us to celebrate this wonderful phenomenon using the ancient instruments at Jantar Mantar."

Planet Hunters: The First Two Planet Candidates Identified by the Public using the Kepler Public Archive Data

"Planet Hunters is a new citizen science project, designed to engage the public in an exoplanet search using NASA Kepler public release data. In the first month after launch, users identified two new planet candidates which survived our checks for false- positives. The follow-up effort included analysis of Keck HIRES spectra of the host stars, analysis of pixel centroid offsets in the Kepler data and adaptive optics imaging at Keck using NIRC2."

From the Comfort of Home, Web Users May Have Found New Planets, Yale University

"These three candidates might have gone undetected without Planet Hunters and its citizen scientists," said Meg Schwamb, a Yale researcher and Planet Hunters co-founder. "Obviously Planet Hunters doesn't replace the analysis being done by the Kepler team. But it has proven itself to be a valuable tool in the search for other worlds."

Think about this: One would think that with this announcement - one that comes on the heels of the Tatooine discovery last week - that the Kepler team would be working overtime on a way to throw more of its data out - sooner - such that they can harness the crowd-sourced power of interested citizens motivated to make a contribution to the discovery of worlds circling other stars. Not only does this help in times of limited budgets, it allows the citizenry a chance to truly participate in their space agency's exploration of the universe - and therein transform that formerly distant, lofty activity into a personal one. When things get personal, people tend to want to stand up and fight for those things.

Hunt for Apollo’s lost dog Snoopy, Skymania

"Astronomers are teaming up with schools to use robotic telescopes over the internet to scan the night sky and find the spacecraft. The telescopes, part of the Faulkes Telescope Project run by Glamorgan University, are in Hawaii and Australia meaning schools can look with them during normal lesson times in the UK."

Amateur Astronomers Contribute Observations of the Brightest Supernova in 20 Years

"Skywatchers in the northern hemisphere are being treated to a rare, bright supernova in a nearby galaxy, and observers worldwide have the opportunity to contribute scientific data to our study of this object. This supernova, named SN 2011fe, exploded in the nearby spiral galaxy Messier 101 some time on August 24, 2011, and quickly became bright enough for backyard astronomers to observe with modest-sized telescopes. The supernova belongs to the class of objects called "Type Ia supernovae" that are caused by the explosion of a white dwarf in a binary star system."

The Kepler science team announced on Aug. 12 the next release of data to the public archive. Quarter three science data collected during the months of September to December 2009 will be available for download on Sept. 23, 2011. Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the surface of the orbiting planet. Although additional observations will be needed over time to reach that milestone, Kepler is detecting planets and planet candidates with a wide range of sizes and orbital distances to help us better understand our place in the galaxy. More.

In a partnership between amateur and professional astronomers, the recent discovery of a dying star's last gasps could help resolve a decades-old debate among astronomers. That is, are stellar companions key to the formation and structure of planetary nebulae? The discovery, by Austrian amateur astronomer Matthias Kronberger, is featured at an International Astronomical Union symposium on planetary nebulae this week in Spain's Canary Islands. The research team's work features a striking image of the new nebula obtained with the Gemini Observatory. More

Mapping Dark Matter is a image analysis competition whose aim is to encourage the development of new algorithms that can be applied to challenge of measuring the tiny distortions in galaxy images caused by dark matter. The aim is to measure the shapes of galaxies to reconstruct the gravitational lensing signal in the presence of noise and a known Point Spread Function. The signal is a very small change in the galaxies'ellipticity, an exactly circular galaxy image would be changed into anellipse; however real galaxies are not circular. The challenge is to measure the ellipticity of 100,000 simulated galaxies.

From: National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Category: Science & Technology
Partners: Royal University Edinburgh, University College London, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Submission Period: Start: May 25, 2011 End: Aug 18, 2011
Winners announced: Aug 25, 2011
Official page

Amateur astronomers, including Nick James of Chelmsford, Essex, England, have captured video of the interesting object. James generated his video of GP59 on the night of Monday, April 11. The video, captured with an 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, is a compilation of 137 individual frames, each requiring 30 seconds of exposure. At the time, the asteroid was approximately 3,356,000 kilometers (2,081,000 miles) distant. Since then, the space rock has become something of a darling of the amateur astronomy community, with many videos available. Here is one recent posting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7wsAZNr56E

"What do you get when you cross a WorldWide Telescope with a Kinect motion-sensing game controller? You get the "universe at your fingertips," according to Microsoft Research's Curtis Wong, who demonstrated the gesture-controlled cosmos today at the MIX11 conference in Las Vegas. Actually, having the universe at your fingertips is how Wong has thought of the freely available WorldWide Telescope project since it was first unveiled in 2008. The software, which is freely available through a Web-based interface and as a standalone program, displays the night sky and lets users zoom in on cosmic imagery from a wide variety of sources. You can even go on 3-D fly-throughs of distant galaxies, or create your own tours of celestial hot spots." More by Alan Boyle at MSNBC

For the second consecutive year, high school students from across Australia joined in a competition to obtain scientifically useful (and aesthetically pleasing) images using the Gemini Observatory. The 2010 winning student team suggested that Gemini focus on an interacting galaxy pair which, they assured, "would be more than just a pretty picture." The spectacular result of this contest, organized by the Australian Gemini Office (AusGO), can be seen at http://www.gemini.edu/node/11625

We performed an image search on Yahoo for "Comet Holmes" on 2010 April 1. Thousands of images were returned. We astrometrically calibrated---and therefore vetted---the images using the Astrometry.net system. The calibrated image pointings form a set of data points to which we can fit a test-particle orbit in the Solar System, marginalizing out image dates and catching outliers. The approach is Bayesian and the model is, in essence, a model of how comet astrophotographers point their instruments.

GLOBE at Night encourages citizen-scientists worldwide to record the brightness of the night sky. During 2 weeks of moonless evenings, children and adults match the appearance of a constellation (Leo in the northern hemisphere and Crux or Leo in the southern hemisphere) with 7 star charts of progressively fainter stars found at http://www.globeatnight.org. Participants then submit their choice of star chart online with their date, time and location to help create a light pollution map worldwide.

The GLOBE at Night 2011 campaign dates are March 22-April 4, 2011, (for the Northern Hemisphere) and March 24-April 6, 2011, (for the Southern Hemisphere). Over 60,000 measurements have been contributed from more than 100 countries over the last 5 years of two-week campaigns.

This year children and adults can submit their measurements in real-time if they have a smart phone or tablet. To do this, use the web application at http://www.globeatnight.org/webapp/. With smart phones and tablets, the location, date and time are put in automatically. And if you do not have a smart phone or tablet, there are user-friendly tools on the GLOBE at Night report page to find latitude and longitude.

Through GLOBE at Night, students, teachers, parents and community members are amassing a data set from which they can explore the nature of light pollution locally and across the globe. Make a difference and join the GLOBE at Night efforts in 2011. Activity packets, one-page flyers and postcards advertising the campaign are available at http://www.globeatnight.org.

Please email any questions about GLOBE at Night to Connie Walker at cwalker@noao.edu.

A citizen science project running for over 100 years reached a key milestone this month when an amateur astronomer contributed the 20 millionth observation of a variable star on February 19, 2011. A variable star changes in brightness over time. Records of these changes can be used to uncover the astrophysical processes within evolving star systems. With a database going back over a century, variable star astronomers have access to a data source unparalleled in astronomy.

NASA will host about 100 registered people to go "behind-the scenes" and learn about planetary discoveries announced last week by the Kepler mission and science flights conducted by NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) aircraft. The event will kick off at the NASA Ames Exploration Center at 10 a.m. PST Friday, Feb. 11, at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. The Tweetup will feature several speakers, including Kepler Deputy Science Team Lead Natalie Batalha, SOFIA Project Scientist Pamela Marcum and David Morrison, Director of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe.

In the constellation of Ophiuchus, above the disk of our Milky Way Galaxy, there lurks a stellar corpse spinning 30 times per second -- an exotic star known as a radio pulsar. This object was unknown until it was discovered last week by three high school students. These students are part of the Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC) project, run by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, WV, and West Virginia University (WVU). More

When astronomer John P. Huchra passed away in October 2010, his friends and colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) sought a way to honor his research and teaching legacies. One way has been the creation of a new interactive WorldWide Telescope (WWT) tour, "John Huchra's Universe," which was unveiled at the 217th AAS meeting in Seattle, Washington, on January 11, 2011, and is now available online. WWT is a free and very powerful interactive astronomy program from Microsoft Research.

NASA has formed a partnership with Spaceweather.com to engage the amateur astronomy community to submit the best images of the orbiting NanoSail-D solar sail. NanoSail-D unfurled the first ever 100-square-foot solar sail in low-Earth orbit on Jan. 20. To encourage observations of NanoSail-D, Spaceweather.com is offering prizes for the best images of this historic, pioneering spacecraft in the amounts of $500 (grand prize), $300 (first prize) and $100 (second prize).

The Milky Way Project has been live since December 7th and is still going strong, taking data from the Spitzer Space Telescope and asking you all to help us map the galaxy. If you haven't tried it out yet, visit http://www.milkywayproject.org. The Milky Way project volunteers have collectively classified more than 116,000 images. This involved marking a whopping 141,000 bubbles, 5,000 possible galaxies and 15,000 star clusters! Those are the raw numbers. When we combine all the individual drawings we find that you have created a catalogue of about 5,000 unique bubbles between you. This is about ten times larger than the current best published catalogue!

astro-ph arXiv:1101.3309: "Although originally classified as galaxies, Ultra Compact Dwarfs (UCDs) share many properties in common with globular star clusters. The debate on the origin and nature of UCDs, and the recently discovered ultra-faint dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies which contain very few stars, has motivated us to ask the question `what is a galaxy?' Our aim here is to promote further discussion of how to define a galaxy and, in particular, what separates it from a star cluster. Like most previous definitions, we adopt the requirement of a gravitationally bound stellar system as a minimum. In order to separate a dwarf galaxy from a globular cluster, we discuss other possible requirements, such as a minimum size, a long two-body relaxation time, a satellite system, the presence of complex stellar populations and non-baryonic dark matter. We briefly mention the implications of each of these definitions if they are adopted. Some special cases of objects with an ambiguous nature are also discussed. Finally, we give our favoured criteria, and in the spirit of a 'collective wisdom', invite readers to vote on their preferred definition of a galaxy via a dedicated website." [survey website link below]

"The Virtual Observatory (VO) is an international attempt to collect astronomical data (images, simulation, mission-logs, etc), organize it and develop tools that let astronomers access this huge amount of information. The VO not only simplifies the work of professional astronomers, it is also a valuable tool for education and public outreach. For teachers and astronomers who actively promote astronomy to the public the VO is an great opportunity to access real astronomical data, use them and have a taste of the workaday life of astronomers." Full paper. More information.

"Dear Colleagues: Dr. Bonnie Buratti and I are members of the DAWN science team and we are in the process of generating a photometric model of 4 Vesta in anticipation of spacecraft rendezvous in August 2011. Ground-based photometry of V-type asteroids (Vestoids) over a wide range of solar phase angles would be extremely useful in constraining our model.

If you would like to join us in this project we would most welcome your help. Please contact Michael.Hicks@jpl.nasa.gov and of course any collaborators would be coauthors on any publication that utilizes the data." [Source: Planetary Exploration Newsletter]

Each summer, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) brings a dozen highly motivated college students to Baltimore, Maryland, for a Space Astronomy Summer Program. The Space Telescope Science Institute is the scientific operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope and for the future James Webb Space Telescope. The Space Astronomy Summer Program runs ten weeks, from mid-June to mid-August, and is designed for upper division undergraduates with a strong interest in space astronomy. Students work individually with STScI researchers and staff on research projects that might include data reduction and interpretation, software development, scientific writing, preparing data for public releases. The program affords students the opportunity to attend lectures on a variety of exciting topics related to space astronomy, the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes. The Space Astronomy Summer Program provides students a fun educational experience within a team spirited environment. Students will receive a stipend of $5200 for the summer and housing assistance. More information

Johan H. Knapen: "Both professional and amateur astronomers have been studying the skies for centuries. Their respec- tive roles, however, have changed considerably. In the 18th and 19th century, for instance, one of the main tasks of professional astronomers was to calculate astronomical data to be used by the merchant fleet and the military, and to provide the society at large with important data such as the times of sunrise and sunset and, in fact, time itself. Amateur astronomers meanwhile entertained themselves with what most astronomers might now consider more interesting activities, such as discovering planets and comets, and observing nebulae. Well-known amateurs include Caroline Herschel (1750-1848) who discovered several comets, and her brother William (1738-1822) who discovered Uranus, several moons of that planet and of Saturn, created a catalogue of nebulae (a term used at the time to describe any extended object), and observed double stars. He constructed hundreds of telescopes, and made a number of important discoveries related to light and radiation. Needless to say, amateur astronomers at the time were wealthy individuals.

"For amateur astronomers, discovering a supernova is a significant and rare feat. For a 10-year-old amateur to do it -- well, that's astronomical. Kathryn Aurora Gray of Fredericton, N.B. is basking in the spotlight after noticing what was later determined to be a magnitude 17 supernova, or exploding star, on New Year's Eve. It's in the distant galaxy UGC 3378, about 240 million light years away, in the constellation of Camelopardalis. The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada says Kathryn is the youngest person to make such a discovery, which was soon verified by amateur astronomers in Illinois and Arizona. The finding has been reported to, confirmed and announced by the International Astronomical Union." More at the Toronto Star

"An amateur astronomer is over the moon after discovering four new planets in his spare time at home. Peter Jalowiczor, 45, has never owned a telescope but still managed to provide scientists with enough information to establish the existence of four gaseous orbs outside the solar system. The gas worker from Rotherham, South Yorkshire, has been officially named by the University of California's Lick-Carnegie Planet Search Team as the co-discoverer of planets HD31253b, HD218566b, HD177830c and HD99492c." More at the Mail Online

Dear Galaxy Zoo: Thanks to your hard work, we've managed to classify most of the galaxies that were in our original batch of images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Don't worry, though, because from today there are fresh, never before seen galaxies added to the interface at www.galaxyzoo.org.

We report on the software architecture we developed for the Open University's remotely controlled telescope PIRATE. This facility is based in Mallorca and used in distance learning modules by undergraduate students and by postgraduate students for research projects. PIRATE (Physics Innovations Robotic Astronomical Telescope Explorer) is a largely Open University funded facility consisting of a small aperture reflecting telescope on a robotic mount, in a robotic dome on top of the main observatory building at the Observatori Astronomic de Mallorca (OAM). Initially, the optical tube assembly (OTA) was a 14 inch (35 cm) f/10 Schmidt Cassegrain telescope (a Celestron 14; PIRATE Mark I). In August 2010 this was upgraded to a PlaneWave Instruments CDK17, a 17 inch (0.43 m) f/6.8 corrected Dall-Kirkham astrograph telescope (PIRATE Mark II).

Idle computers are the astronomers' playground: Three citizen scientists--an American couple and a German--have discovered a new radio pulsar hidden in data gathered by the Arecibo Observatory. This is the first deep-space discovery by Einstein@Home, which uses donated time from the home and office computers of 250,000 volunteers from 192 different countries. This is the first genuine astronomical discovery by a public volunteer distributed computing project. The details of their discovery and the process of getting there are revealed in a paper published in the Aug. 12 edition of Science Express.

The new pulsar--called PSR J2007+2722--is a neutron star that rotates 41 times per second. It is in the Milky Way, approximately 17,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula. Unlike most pulsars that spin as quickly and steadily, PSR J2007+2722 sits alone in space, and has no orbiting companion star. Astronomers consider it especially interesting since it is likely a recycled pulsar that lost its companion. However they cannot rule out that it may be a young pulsar born with an lower-than-usual magnetic field.

Chris and Helen Colvin, of Ames, Iowa, and Daniel Gebhardt, of Universitaet Mainz, Musikinformatik, Germany, are credited with this discovery. Their computers, along with half a million others from around the world, are harnessed to analyze data for Einstein@Home (volunteers contribute about two computers each).

Einstein@Home--based at the Center for Gravitation and Cosmology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Albert Einstein Institute (AEI), Hannover, Germany--has been searching for gravitational waves in data from the U.S. based LIGO (Large Interferometer Gravitational Observatory) since 2005. Starting in March of 2009, Einstein@Home also began searching for signals from radio pulsars in astronomical observations from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Arecibo, a National Science Foundation (NSF) facility operated by Cornell University, is the world's largest and most sensitive radio telescope. About one-third of Einstein@Home's computing capacity is used to search Arecibo data.

Cassini and Amateurs Chase Storm on Saturn

"With the help of amateur astronomers, the composite infrared spectrometer instrument aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft has taken its first look at a massive blizzard in Saturn's atmosphere. The instrument collected the most detailed data to date of temperatures and gas distribution in that planet's storms."