The Everyday Spacer blog hosts the latest Carnival of Space.
Carnival of Space #372 – Everyday Spacer
The Everyday Spacer blog hosts the latest Carnival of Space.
The Everyday Spacer blog hosts the latest Carnival of Space.
Here’s a SETI Institute video of a panel discussion on the topic of accurately depicting exoplanets: Artists Imaging Exoworlds-Getting It Right (SETI Con 2)
From the caption:
Panelists:
Moderator:
An amazingly beautiful aurora image by James Woodend wins the Royal Museum Greenwich‘s contest for the 2014 Astronomy Photographer of the Year. See the top images at Earth & Space : 2014 winners : Exhibitions : What’s on : RMG
9 January 2014
Canon 5D Mk III camera; 33mm f/3.2 lens; ISO 1000; 10-second exposure
Although this is not a strong aurora, they sometimes make the best reflection shots. The water was very still – you can see the icebergs floating in the lagoon and their reflections. In the background is the Vatnajökull Glacier.
The pale-green glow of the aurora comes from oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere, energized by subatomic particles blasted out by the Sun. The particles are funnelled down towards the north and south poles by the Earth’s magnetic field, which is why these spectacular light shows are so often juxtaposed with the frozen scenery of the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Here the photographer has skilfully captured the delicate, icy colouration of land, water and sky.
Here’s a series of videos about the contest leading up to the winners:
For the recent Burning Man event, the “Desert Wizards of Mars” brought their Black Rock Observatory. Funded via a Kickstarter, the project include two domed-covered 21 inch telescopes and the Mars Rover Art Car.
Here’s an article about the project : Bringing Space Science Education to Burning Man–and Beyond – Co.Create.
And their Kickstarter video:
With the revived Kepler space observatory once again looking for planets orbiting other stars, the citizens science program Planet Hunters is graduating to Planet Hunters 2.0: A Brand New Planet Hunters – Planet Hunters
On December 16, 2010, the Zooniverse launched Planet Hunters to enlist the public’s help to search for extrasolar planets (exoplanets) in the data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. Back then we didn’t know what we would find. It may have been the case that no new planets were discovered and that computers had the job down to a fine art. The project was a gamble on the ability of human pattern recognition to beat machines just occasionally and spot the telltale dip in a star’s brightness due to a transiting planet that was missed by automated routines looking for repeating patterns.
Nearly four years later, Planet Hunters has become a success beyond anyone’s expectation. To date 8 published scientific papers have resulted from the efforts of nearly 300,000 volunteers worldwide. Planet Hunters has discovered 9 planet candidate co-discoveries with the Kepler effort, over 30 unknown planet candidates not previously identified by the Kepler team, a confirmed transiting circumbinary planet in a quadruple star system (PH1b), a confirmed Jupiter-sized planet in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star (PH2b), and identified the 7th planet candidate of a 7 planet star system.
Today in collaboration with JPL’s PlanetQuest, the Planet Hunters science team and the Zooniverse are proud to announce the launch of Planet Hunters version 2.0. We’ve taken your feedback and the lessons learned over the past 3.5 years to build a fast new interface that we think will take the project to the next stage. Using the Zooniverse’s latest technology, Planet Hunters 2.0 is built specifically with the next generation of transiting exoplanet surveys in mind, including the new K2 mission, which repurposes the Kepler spacecraft.
Kepler had been monitoring ~170,000 stars for the signatures of transiting exoplanets over the past 4 years in the Kepler field located in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra. The new-two wheel Kepler mission dubbed ‘K2‘ will have Kepler observing brand new sets of 10,000-20,000 stars every 75 days. These stars are different from the sources that Kepler had been monitoring in the past. Your eyes will be one of the first to gaze upon these observations. Most of the K2 target stars will have never before been searched for planets, providing a new opportunity to find distant worlds. K2 observations will be made available by NASA and the Kepler team to the entire astronomical community and the public shortly after being transmitted to Earth and processed. We aim to get them on Planet Hunters 2.0 as fast as we can.
See also