Video: Panel on artists, exoplanets, and getting it right

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:

  • Lynette Cook – most widely known as an out-of-this-world space artist, Cook has enthralled others with the wonders of the cosmos via her depictions of planets discovered outside our solar system. Published worldwide in books, periodicals, and documentaries, these renderings have been featured on ABC7 News and in USA Today.
  • Danielle Futselaar – owner of ArtSource Graphic Design Studio in the Netherlands. Artist/Illustrator and Graphic Designer. Her clients include UNICEF, TNT and AS Watson. Danielle is also the SETI Institute’s TeamSETI Volunteer Captain of Creative Design where she has illustrated and created complete graphic design packages for fundraising campaigns and SETIcon II. She also created the official artist impression of Asteroid Minerva and its Two Moons discovered by SETI Institute’s Franck Marchis.
  • Eric Hanson- A visual effects designer specializing in the creation of digital environments and effects for feature films, Eric Hanson has worked with noted visual effects houses such as Digital Domain, Sony Imageworks, Dream Quest Images, and Walt Disney Feature Animation. His credits include The Fifth Element (1997), Bicentennial Man (1999), Cast Away (2000), Hollow Man (2000), Mission to Mars (2000), Spider-Man (2002) and Atlantis as well as many special-venue films.
  • Mark Showalter – Showalter is rabid about rings. While everyone knows about Saturn’s spectacular ring system, it’s often forgotten that Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune are also encircled by fainter and narrower rings. Each of these systems interacts closely with a family of small, inner moons. Showalter works on some of NASA’s highest-profile missions to the outer planets, including Cassini, now orbiting Saturn, and New Horizons, which flew past Jupiter en route to its 2015 encounter with Pluto. He has even searched for the rings of Mars, although so far with no success. Known for his persistence in planetary image analysis, Mark’s work on the earlier Voyager mission led to his discovery of Jupiter’s faint, outer “gossamer” rings and Saturn’s tiny ring-moon, Pan.

Moderator:

  • Franck Marchis – Dr. Franck Marchis is a Planetary Astronomer at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute and also an associate astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris. Our solar system is characterized by considerable diversity of its constituent bodies. Franck Marchis’ first involvement in the study of this diversity started in 1996 while working at the UNAM Astronomy Department in Mexico City. He made the first ground-based observations of the volcanoes on the jovian moon Io, using the first Adaptive Optics (AO) systems available on the European Southern Observatory (ESO) 3.6 m telescope in Chile. After a brief stay in London and four years in Chile at ESO, he completed in 2000 his PhD in France. Since then, he has been studying asteroids with large telescopes and he discovered in 2005 the first triple using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. His work consists in using and developing adaptive optics on current and future 30m telescopes dedicated to the study of the solar system and extra solar planets.

Terrific ‘Aurora over a Glacier Lagoon’ image wins 2014 Astronomy Photographer of the Year

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

[]

Aurora over a Glacier Lagoon by James Woodend, UK

9 January 2014

Canon 5D Mk III camera; 33mm f/3.2 lens; ISO 1000; 10-second exposure

What the photographer says…

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.

What it shows…

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:

The Black Rock Observatory at Burning Man

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.

dust[1]

Here’s an article about the project : Bringing Space Science Education to Burning Man–and Beyond – Co.Create.

And their Kickstarter video:

Citizens science: Planet Hunters 2.0

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 2.0A 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.

Continue…

See also

Kepler's Second Light: How K2 Will Work
This conception illustration depicts how solar pressure can be used to balance
NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, keeping the telescope stable enough to continue
searching for transiting planets around distant stars.
Image Credit: NASA Ames/W Stenzel