New more astronomy audio?

We have a ton of astronomy audio content laying around here at Slacker Astronomy. We have our entire podcast feed, which dates back to February 2005 and spans entire epochs of Slacker Astronomy casts and styles. Then there is the little known Extra feed which has tons of interviews and oddball content. We also have our Slack Video Feed, which has random videos from over the years.

Poke around those and you might find some entertainment. For example, there is this little gem of an interview with David Levy!

As always, let us know what you think in the comments or email us.

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NASA’s Great Observatories Celebrate International Year of Astronomy

cool pic.

too bad GRO isn’t around any more

–Ben

NASA’s Great Observatories Celebrate International Year of Astronomy

November 10, 2009: A never-before-seen view of the turbulent heart of our
Milky Way galaxy is being unveiled by NASA on Nov. 10. This event will
commemorate the 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the
heavens in 1609. In celebration of this International Year of Astronomy,

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/28/

Axel Mellinger’s All-Sky Milky Way Panorama 2.0

fyi:
–Ben
====================
Axel Mellinger’s All-Sky Milky Way Panorama 2.0
Between October 2007 and August 2009, a new digital all-sky mosaic image was assembled from more than 3000 individual CCD frames. Using an SBIG STL-11000 camera, 70 fields (each covering 40° × 27°) were imaged from dark-sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. In order to increase the dynamic range beyond the 16 bits of the camera’s analog-to-digital converter (of which approx. 12 bits provide data above the noise level), three different exposure times (240 s, 15 s and 0.5 s) were used. Five frames were taken for each exposure time and filter setting. The fields were photometrically calibrated using standard catalog stars and sky background data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The new panorama has an image scale of 36 arcsec/pixel (approx. 3× the resolution of the old, film-based mosaic), a limiting magnitude of approx. 14 mag and an 18 bit dynamic range. At full resolution and bit depth, it is a 648 MPixel, 7.7 GByte FITS cube. Unlike the old image, the new panorama was carefully calibrated to preserve the large-scale star and dust clouds.

http://home.arcor.de/axel.mellinger/

Get Ready … Enceladus Here We Come!

fyi:
News from the Saturn System.
–Ben

======================
November 1, 2009

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

Here’s a reminder that tomorrow (Mon) sees the first of two Cassini close flybys this month of the moon Enceladus. Images should start arriving here at CICLOPS around 12:30 pm Mountain Standard Time tomorrow; we’ll post the best raw images as soon as we are able at:

http://ciclops.org

The finest resolution will be approximately 60 meters/pixel of the south polar terrain.

And the next flyby, which is specifically designed for high resolution imaging, will occur on November 21, when the best resolution will be about 12 meters/pixel.

Enceladus remains a very high priority object of interest for the Cassini mission, and we look forward to these fine opportunities to learn more about its active south polar cap.

Also, for those of you in the San Francisco Bay area, I will be giving a public lecture at the Morrison Planetarium of the California Academy of Sciences on December 7, 2009 at 7:30 pm.

http://www.calacademy.org/events/?e=268&d=07&m=12&y=2009

Hope to see you there!

Enjoy,

Carolyn Porco
Cassini Imaging Team Leader
Director, CICLOPS
Space Science Institute
Boulder, CO

http://twitter.com/carolynporco
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Carolyn-Porco/116163229386