SG 4.0: Fairy Tales of Predictions

In this show we cover stories of astronomical predictions: the good, bad and why it’s easier to be the former than the latter. We also have an interview with Ryan Wyatt, a science visualizer at the American Museum of Natural History who talks about what goes on behind the scenes to turn those faint fuzzies into pretty pictures and gives us a report from a recent astro-visualization conference.

Of course we have two new skits, news and more. Everyone is in tha house for this one so check it out, yo…

Details, MP3 and show notes are here.

Discuss the show in our forum here.

Keep Looking Up

All astronomers - professional, amateur, armchair or otherwise, have a point in their life where they “got it”. It’s kinda like the eureka moment of the inventor, minus the dollar signs over the eyeballs and the cash register KA-CHING! in the background. (In fact, that “got it”, usually portends a bad case of aperture fever a few months hence.)

For me, that moment came when I first saw Saturn through a telescope on my porch in subburban Dallas. But leading up to that moment were years of watching Jack Horkheimer, The Star Hustler.

Back in the mid 1980’s, when I was in elementary school, television channels actually went off the air late at night. I know, perish the thought! We were such savages back then. When the local PBS station went off the air, it would play the five minute show “Jack Horkheimer, Star Hustler” show. I discovered it by accident, but started watching it religiously.

Jack is a portly, incredibly charming and friendly fella who laughs at cheesy jokes while talking about naked eyeball astronomy with equally cheezy new age music and graphics. It was the kind of stuff almost anyone could enjoy, even from urban skies. He may not have taken the geek out of the astronomy stereotype, but he definitely took out the nerd!

I probably owe my career to him more than anyone else outside of my family. Without that show, I wouldn’t be doing what I do today. And Slacker Astronomy certainly wouldn’t be around. (In fact, now that I look at SA I recognize quite a bit of our show owes a bit to his influence.)

Eventually it became more difficult to find his show on the air as TV stations began running 24/7. One of the first things I did on the new “Internets” was hunt down his show and find footage. This was around 1994 or so. I was shocked to discover that he was being forced to change his name from “Star Hustler” to something else. It seems that “star hustler” sounded too sexually provocative and some people protested! So they held an online vote as to what the new name would be. I don’t remember the other options, but Star Gazer won and it sounds appropriate, if a bit less dynamic, to me.

November, 2006 was the 30-year anniversary of the show. The basic format of the show hasn’t changed, but they have kept up with technology. The graphics are high tech and you can now watch his show as a video podcast (subscribe here).

Jack Horkheimer has plenty of accolades, but he is still probably one of the most underrated astronomy popularizers out there. He has probably introduced astronomy to more people (in the USA at least) than anyone not named Carl Sagan. And he keeps on going, we’ll “keep looking up!”

• Discuss in our forums
• Jack Horkheimer @ Slackerpedia Galactica

P/S: He has a children’s book out about astronomy. Being Christmas and all, it may make for a nice present for a young child.

The Story of V838 Mon

In this video, Rebekah and Travis tell the story of one of the strangest and newest stars in the sky: V838 Mon. Download the video via the podcast feed or view it view the Show Notes.
Thanks to Stuart Lowe at the Astronomy Blog for the V838 Mon animation.

Show notes and more on this episode are available here.

Discuss in our forums here.

3 Questions. Question 1: Should Pluto be a planet?

Here is the 1st part of a 3-part series where we ask people questions. The first question is: should Pluto be a planet? The answer, according to these 11 people, is yes. 6 out of 11 said yes (with one abstention). It shows how contentious
this issue is.

Watch it now! (17meg MP4 video file)

Most of the people on this were attending a meeting of the AAVSO.

Next episode: Are there extraterrestrials?

Stellar Worlds #6

The tea leaves

The recent shift in the U.S. electoral landscape is likely to have many effects on astronomy. This is mainly due to the fact that the vast majority of astronomical projects are funded either directly or indirectly by public money. Directly this is mostly through NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) (with some coming from the Dept. of Defense and the Dept. of Energy) and indirectly funds come through the higher education system, most of which is state funded. And these funds account for the overwhelning majority of astronomical support in the world. (Example, NASA’s FY06 budget is around US$16 Billion, the European Space Agency’s FY06 budget is around US$3.7 Billion.)

Our friend Keith Cowling at NASAWatch has a nice rundown of the expected changes in committee appointments. Another friend, Phil Plait the “Bad Astronomer”, gives a different nice rundown of what this means in the evolution/creationsim debate.

My take is that funding for NSF and NASA may not change much. The Republican former chair of the science committee, Sherwood Boehlert, actually had a reputation as a good astronomy supporter. The likely new chair of the committee, Bart Gordon, used to be the ranking minority member. In the past, they worked surprisingly well together (unlike so many other committees) so Gordon is pretty familiar with what’s going on. But Boehlert is retiring so it remains to be seen who will be the ranking minority member now. Ralph Hall is the senior minority member. He is from Texas and, naturally, is friendly to oil and energy interests, which would be worrisome if the Republicans were still in charge.

Keith mentions in his article that VSE may suffer due to increased scrutiny from congress. VSE is the “Vision for Space Exploration”, Bush’s desire to go back to the Moon and then on to Mars. It’s a mixed bag for astronomers. Increased public interest in space is always good. But NASA is gutting its science missions to pay for what amounts to largely an engineering endevour. For example, the Europa mission has been axed, despite being a much more promising place for life than Mars! (We have found life in conditions on Earth that we expect to find on Europa.)

Some cool news? Former astronaut Bill Nelson, a long-time senator from Florida, will head the Senate subcomittee on Science. Nelson flew on a shuttle in the 80’s as part of a program to put civilians in space. First they sent him along with another congressman, then the program was cancelled due to the Challenger loss.

Overall, good people will be in key positions. But with the political landscape still polarized and the government running a huge budget deficit, I don’t expect many changes.

State of the Wiki

Hey, all. The Slackerpedia Galatica is coming along great. In fact, it’s far better than I could have hoped. We owe a lot of thanks to a ton of people. This is turning into a really fun guide. A few updates:

1. Thanks to Luke Hayes for the new logos. And as always thanks to Matt for being our main sysop. And the Slacker Union still cracks me up.

2. Don’t forget to upload your picture (or e-mail it to info@slackerastronomy.org) so we can include it in the poster paper we will present at the upcoming AAS meeting in Seattle. Take credit for your handywork!

3. We have about pages from around 63 users. We have about 450 entries (not counting talk and admin pages), of which about 350 have some minimal content. I would like to dedicate the month of November to expanding the existing pages. Make new pages for topical items or if you just have a terrific idea that can’t wait. Otherwise, focus on the pages that exist. Add some oomph to them. Add some pictures, etc. Here are some examples of some neat pages:

• Milky Way
  
• Science Fiction
• New Horizons
• Astrophotography

(There are lots of other good ones, I just hit random and chose four)
Not everything has to be so ellaborate. The Universe entry has a special place in my heart too. Use your best judgement. But let’s improve what we have and then in December start expanding some more.

Once this is done, we’ll start a big promotional campaign for the wiki. But feel free to tell your friends now, too.

Polytropes and Recording Studios

I’ve been an amateur astronomer for a long time but I had never heard the word “polytrope” before. It turns out it is an important concept in stellar astrophysics. It also, in a round about way, brings me back to my first job at a recording studio.

In 1988 I graduated from Berklee College of Music and got a job in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin at a recording studio called Royal Recorders. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Yerkes Observatory is also located on Lake Geneva, just a few miles from where I worked. One of the great theoretical astronomers of the 20th century, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, aka “Chandra”, worked at Yerkes for almost 30 years.

There was a time in astronomy when we didn’t know for sure that nucleosynthesis was powering the luminosity of stars. We hadn’t figured out how to get the temperature high enough for thermonuclear reactions. Chandra, standing on the shoulders of many giants, helped figure it out and formalized a theory for stars based on an idealized fluid model — a polytropic process. Polytropic means it is a reversible process where the pressure is proportional to a power of the density.

By combining hydrostatic equilibrium with a polytropic model of stars, we could finally solve the equations to predict the temperature and density of stars. When we plugged in the numbers, using the “standard model” of stars developed by Eddington, we found central temperatures in the tens of millions of degrees — plenty hot for nucleosythnesis.

So in terms of astronomy, a polytrope is a mathematical model of a star. You plug in a few assumptions and you get out many of the physical parameters that describe a star — the temperature, density, mass, radius and pressure. We can describe much of the structure of the HR diagram, from first principles, using this model.

Chandra left Yerkes around 1965, the year I was born. I visited Yerkes for the first time just this year. I’m also learning about Chandra’s work for the first time in the astrophysics class I’m taking. It is fun to think that I walked the same streets and drove the same roads as Chandra, in a little corner of Wisconsin, a long time ago.

SG 3.0: Planet-eating light echos and unicorns?

Things are starting to gel with the new show. Rebekah is back so we have two old-school skits on V838 Mon’s light echo and whether it was caused by a planet engulfing event. And we have another skit about a cool meteorite discovered in Kansas using a novel approach that may help look for water on Mars.

Then we roll through some news, topics posted in the forum, and some chit chat. Doug calls in from his observing run at Gemini South on the Cerro Pachon mountain in Chile.

Show notes and links are here..

Discuss the show here…