Astronomy the gateway to scientific literacy | Tom Vorobjov | TEDxTrencin
This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Tomas, who has discovered a comet and cooperated with distinguished...
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Astronomy the gateway to scientific literacy | Tom Vorobjov | TEDxTrencin - Video
2014.10.17 Radio Astronomy
For our October talk, Jay Bascombe Wilson, who built his first radio telescope over 50 years agor, talks about "The Invisible Universe: Radio Astronomy at LTO". Mr. Wilson speaks about exciting...
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Eric Schlegel, Ph.D. - UTSA Physics and Astronomy
Professor Schlegel discusses his research in Astrophysics for Academic Inquiry Scholarship (AIS1203)
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Comet Siding Spring Recap - Misconceptions and Anomalies [by Astronomy Live]
This video is by Astronomy Live; addressing some of the misconceptions about comet Siding Spring. Astronomy Live #39;s channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/messierhunter/ Link to the original...
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Comet Siding Spring Recap - Misconceptions and Anomalies [by Astronomy Live] - Video
Astronomy C13 - 2014-10-23: The Evolution of Complex Life on Earth
Astronomy C13, 001 - Fall 2014 Origins: from the Big Bang to the Emergence of Humans - Charles Marshall, Eliot Quataert All Rights Reserved.
By: UCBerkeley
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Astronomy C13 - 2014-10-23: The Evolution of Complex Life on Earth - Video
Partial Solar Eclipse (10/23/14)
Live from Celestron #39;s Joseph A. Lupica Jr. Observatory in Torrance, CA! Focus Astronomy is providing a live video feed of today #39;s partial solar eclipse!
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Astronomy Cast 354 - Comet Siding Spring vs Mars
We were witness to a once in a million year event. A close approach of Comet Siding Spring to the Planet Mars. And fortunately, humanity had a fleet of spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet, ready...
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Astronomy - Ch. 6: Telescopes (2 of 21) Diffraction of Light and the Telescope
Visit http://ilectureonline.com for more math and science lectures! In this video I will discuss the diffraction of light with respect to telescopes.
By: Michel van Biezen
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Astronomy - Ch. 6: Telescopes (2 of 21) Diffraction of Light and the Telescope - Video
One of the easiest ways to take a spacewalk without ever leaving Earth is to scan the night sky with binoculars from the comfort of a reclining lounge chair on a clear, dark night. But for the best experience, you better make sure those binoculars are actually designed for astronomy. To see our picks for the best binoculars of various sizes and specialties, read our Best Astronomy Binoculars: Editors' Choice wrap-up. If you'd like help picking for yourself, there are a few things you need to know.
Your eyes are marvelously adapted for sensing light and color, and for reacting to bright and dark. But it's your brain that builds your moving picture of the world.
You see in stereo. But your two eyes give you more than just depth perception.
True, the differences in data between your left and right eyes are integrated into depth information by your busy mind. Even though the vast distances of the universe make it challenging to perceive depth, if you inform yourself in advance with some knowledge about the objects you are going to be observing, you can begin to see the universe in 3D. Binoculars make this mental gymnastics faster and easier.
Binoculars are like eyeball extensions, keeping all your brain's visual circuits focused on the task of enjoying the wonders of space. Keeping both eyes walled off from distracting information plays a happy trick on your mental computer.
Depending on the pair you pick, you could see 25 or even 50 times more stars with binoculars than with your unaided eyes. This is not due to the magnification alone, but to the phenomenon of perceptive narrowing driving a flow state. Some people use the term focus, or clarity, to describe the feeling. But it's not an illusion; it's a measurable effect.
Telescopes are big. Even little ones are bigger, heavier and longer than most binoculars. So telescopes need to sit on tripods or rocker-boxes for stability. A hand-held spyglass might have been good enough for Captain Kidd, but every modern navy uses binoculars. Angling a long tube up toward the sky makes the shake problem even worse; your extended arm wiggles the front objective lens. Binoculars can lock in tightly to both your eye sockets and your hands are close in to your face for more stability. [Related: Best Telescopes for Beginner: A Buying Guide]
Telescopes do make objects look larger. But their main job is to gather light. Paradoxically, the more a telescope magnifies an object, the dimmer that object appears. That's a problem when observing deep-sky targets like comets, galaxies and widely diffuse star clusters. It's an issue for everything, really, except the moon which can be too bright and a few vivid planets.
Most telescopes use a single eyepiece. Binocular literally means "two eyes." You get twice the opportunity to paint your brain with starlight. Remember, seeing occurs in your mind's eye. For a most fulfilling visual experience, get all your brain's "wetware" working on it.
Telescopes show a small area. Binoculars, with their wider field of view, let you scan the sky for targets. And binoculars give you a much better appreciation for how objects relate to one another. They give you a better chance to see patterns in the cosmos.
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Here's the situation: You only have, say, $250 to spend on binoculars. You want to sky-watch, but you also want to go birding, boating, hiking and you want to see the players at the game up close, even though your seats are in nosebleed country. You need an astronomy-capable medium size binocular. We think we've found a solution for you: Celestron's SkyMaster 8x56, our Editors' Choice for the best medium-size binoculars for astronomy.
Weighing only 38 ounces, you can carry these for hours during your busy outdoor day. At night, lie back in an outdoor recliner and you can hand-hold them for a good long while. The wide rubber bumpers on the oculars' lens-guards are comfortable enough to rest on your cheekbones and brow (eye "orbits"). [Related: See our Buyer's Guide: How to Choose Binoculars for Stargazing]
BUY a pair of Celestron SkyMaster 8x56 binoculars >> Below: See our Hands On Video Tour of Celestron's SkyMaster 8x56 (Click to Play):
But for the most soulful starlight absorption you'll want to spend $16 for a tripod adapter and perhaps up to $100 for a tripod with multi-axis head. Of course, you can use your existing camera tripod. Just make sure it doesnt wiggle in the wind; dancing stars will give you a headache.
These SkyMasters are sealed and wrapped in rubber. They won't slip in your hands, or slide around a moderately pitching boat deck. They were "nitrogen purged" at the factory in China, which means they've been injected with nitrogen gas, "chasing out" any water vapor before sealing the optical cans.
Best Astronomy Binoculars 2014 (Editors' Choice)
Taken together, these factors effectively "waterproof" the binoculars' optics (though the adjustable ocular ring and the center focus wheel could rust or corrode in time). They also make the optics resistant to condensation. You can still make them fog up by, say, taking them from your dry, air-conditioned den straight out into the hot muggy late-summer night. [And when you go back in again, after an hour or so in moist air, it'd be a good idea to leave the lens caps off until your 8x56s are completely dry.] Or save you stargazing for the night after the cold front passes. As every skywatcher soon learns, the crispest stars are seen on the coldest night.
Eyeglass wearers will be thankful for the relatively long 18mm of eye relief. [Eye relief is the distance from the eyepiece lens' surface to the last spot a full-width image can be seen.] You can probably get your glasses cozily up against the soft twist-up style lens guards to seal out stray light, which can distract you from reading those messages the stars are sending you.
The generous 7-millimeter exit pupil is wide enough for your mind to fall into. ["Exit pupil" is the area of virtual image at the binoculars' "focus point," the circle you look into.] We've notice relatively larger exit pupil diameters on small and medium Celestrons. The perfectly round disc of that exit pupil tells you something encouraging about the quality of the BaK-4 glass Porro prismswithin. A lesser binocular might show you some angular fall-off, especially towards the top of the exit pupil.
The 8x56s will focus no closer than about 25 feet (7.6 meters). That's enough for most terrestrial applications. If youre closer to an animal than that, you probably don't need it magnified unless it's tiny. Similarly, any sports activity taking place that close to you is de-facto a naked-eye proposition. The stars, of course are very, very far away. At 5.8 degrees, the Celestron's field of view is decidedly "medium" compared to, for example, the Vixen Ascot 10x50's 8.5 degrees. But its wide enough to get a satisfying sense of perspective on objects in the sky.
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Bigness is a virtue in telescopes most of the time. The larger the light-bucket, the more photons ("raindrops" of light) it can collect. But big telescopic instruments are also heavier, more ungainly and can demand greater care and feeding. We've chosen the Celestron SkyMaster 25x100 binoculars as our Editors' Choice for large astronomy binoculars.
In the case of binoculars, serving up the universe in stereo gives you more than double the pleasure of one-eye on the sky. But servicing the demands of two eyes more than doubles the mass of the optical system. So as you scale up from the small portable "field glasses" that might be great for watching, say, fast moving racecars to the larger apertures appropriate for resolving the majesty of the slowly revolving stars, the glass gets very heavy, very quickly.
BUY a pair of Celestron SkyMaster 25x100 binoculars >> Below: Hands On Video Tour of Celestron's SkyMaster 25x100 (Click to Play):
At 156 ounces, Celestron's SkyMaster 25x100s are impossible to hold steady on the stars by hand. Dont even try. But perch them on a suitably hefty mount and theyll convey an optically accurate sky-watching experience that can move your soul. [Related: See our Buyer's Guide: How to Choose Binoculars for Stargazing]
So, buying these Celestrons means also buying a tripod and maybe a counter-weighted arm. But the binoculars are ready when you do: A solid-feeling "reinforced" metal bar forms a keel, from the objective lens covers at the front to the bulbous "prism warts" towards the rear. A built-in tripod adapter slides along this spine; a knurled knob tightens the adapter down at your preferred position. [When your observing night is over, the bar makes a comfortably grip-able lifting fixture; which you've likely set it at the natural balance point. So you can "one-hand" these heavy beasts into their protective case.]
Now that you're set-up, have a good look at your Celestron 25x100s, starting at the business end where youll put your eyes. The 4-millimeter "exit pupils" (the bright spots of actual image) look eerily small surrounded by the large-looking 20 mm eyepieces. But they're big enough to fill most adults' dark-adapted eyes. And the 15 mm "eye relief" (the distance from the eyepiece's surface to the last spot a full-width image can be seen) is long enough for eyeglass wearers to get a well-focused broad view. [Our Editors' Choice Runner-Up Orion Astronomy 20x80 binoculars has a slightly longer eye relief at 17 mm.] You probably won't even have to fold down the rubber eyepiece-guards.
Best Astronomy Binoculars 2014 (Editors' Choice)
Those eyepieces each (independently) rotate through 450 degrees to provide critical sharp focus. They aren't really "diopters," such as you find on lower-power binoculars. It's best to think of this whole rig as a pair of side-by-side 100 mm refractor telescopes, with image-erecting prisms built-in, and separate non-removable eyepieces
Jump to the other end of the binoculars, look "backwards" through the 100 mm objective lenses and you'll notice the barrels' interiors are well knurled. Small raised rings down the length of the tubes act as light diffusers, baffling the prisms from late-arriving rays, reducing scattered light, which can compromise your image.
And the images these big eyes can pass are astounding. I like trying to pick out clusters of galaxies in large binoculars, like springtime's Leo Triplets (they aren't really siblings). But just to manage expectations, some of the best galaxy groups are too faint and faraway for even big binoculars, like autumn's Stephan's Quintet (they don't really play music, anyway).
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I'm not the world's best planner. A skywatching trip is likely to be a spur of the moment thing. When a clear, dark night rattles my cage, I need to just "grab and go." And I may not put my binoculars back on the shelf until many days, many miles and many other activities later.
The Oberwerk Mariner 8x40s can take the travel. They excel at astronomy. They're totally small enough to wear for a full afternoon of birding or soccer-match watching. And, as the Mariner name implies, they are waterproof and can absorb an occasional bump from sliding across a boat deck or cabin top, without going out of alignment. That's why we've picked the Oberwerk Mariner 8x40 binoculars as our Editors' Choice for Best Small Astronomy Binoculars.
BUY the Oberwerk Mariner 8x40 binoculars >> - Below: See our Hands On Video Tour of Oberwerk's Mariner 8x40 (Click to Play):
At 5.5 inches (14 centimeters) from front to back and 6.5 inches (16.5 cm) wide, these Oberwerks make a brawny, satisfying handful of tech. If you're new to comparing astronomy binoculars, it may strike you as odd that we're calling these "small." Certainly, there are many smaller, lighter binoculars on the market. What we mean is, "small, but still good for astronomy." And at astronomy, these "binos" excel. [Related: See our Buyer's Guide: How to Choose Binoculars for Stargazing]
At 37 ounces (1 kilogram), the 8x40s are a meaty chunk to wield all night long. But they are quite comfortable. They stay out of the way, even if you are also working a telescope. In fact, I found them to be the perfect complement to a telescope. Use your Mariners to scan a wide sky field for an interesting object or region, then warp yourself in closer with your mono 'scope. If you're into astrophotography, you can enjoy the sky with your Oberwerks while your telescope is busy recording photons (during which time, you will NOT want to touch it).
You'll be impressed at the tack-sharp points of stars and the crisp detail when observing lunar terrain with these Mariners. As you reel in the tantalizingly dim, milky light of other galaxies, or of diffuse star clusters within Earth's own galaxy, Oberwerk's impressively high contrast-ratio will sear those stars into your memory. And you may happily lose yourself for many minutes in the celestial depths of the Mariner's unusually wide 8.4-degree field of view. Your mind may switch from just "skywatching" to virtual sky-walking. That's exactly where you want to be.
Build-quality, optical path and prism design are responsible for the mass factor. These Mariners, like every set of astronomy binoculars we reviewed, use the optically superior "porro-prism" design as opposed to smaller, lighter and less costly "roof prisms." You'll find a few very similar binoculars with other name brands on them, but none with better coatings, quality control, shock protection or water resistance.
As with any optical device, ability to gather light is directly related to aperture (optical opening). For the most part, the bigger the aperture, the better, as long as the light rays remain collimated (aligned). Here, these Oberwerks excel: The nicely coated 40mm objective lenses haul in more photons from faint stars than all but the most expensive competitors.
Stepping outside your home, your binoculars are often required to "equilibrate" to the cooler temperatures of night, especially in wintertime. The Mariners' internal optics are nitrogen-purged, perfectly coated and properly sealed. They will not fog as quickly as most other brands.
If you wear eyeglasses (I do), you'll appreciate the way the guards around the eyepieces work. A quarter-turn rotates them fully up or down. It's easy to get your bespectacled eyes just the right distance from the "exit pupil," the round spot where the image forms. My eyes are set close together. The bridge of my nose started to feel just a little bit pinched, right at the point where I got the exit pupils to resolve into a single stereoscopic image; my only moment of discomfort while observing with these Mariners.
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Will cubesats lead to a new technological branch of astronomy? Goddard engineers are taking the necessary steps to make cubesat-sized telescopes a reality. (Credit: NASA, UniverseToday/TRR)
One doesnt take two cubesats and rub them together tomake static electricity. Rather, you send them on a briefspace voyage to low-earth orbit (LEO) and space them apart some distance and voil, you have a telescope. That is the plan of NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center engineers and also what has been imagined by several others.
Cubesats are one of the big crazes in the new space industry. But nearly all that have flown to-date are simple rudderless cubes taking photos when they are oriented correctly. The GSFC engineers are planning to give two cubes substantial control of their positions relative to each other and to the Universe surrounding them. With one holding a telescope and the other a disk to blot out the bright sun, their cubesat telescope will do what not even the Hubble Space Telescope is capable of and for far less money.
Semper (left), Calhoun, and Shah are advancing the technologies needed to create a virtual telescope that they plan to demonstrate on two CubeSats. (Image/Caption Credit: NASA/W. Hrybyk)
The 1U, the 3U, the 9U these are all cubesats of different sizes. They all have in common the unit size of 1. A 1U cubesatis 10 x 10 x 10 centimeters cubed. A cube of this size will hold one liter of water (about one quart) which is one kilogram by weight. Or replace that water with hydrazine and you have very close to 1 kilogram of mono-propellent rocket fuel which can take a cubestat places.
GSFC aerospace engineers, led by Neerav Shah, dont want to go far, they just want to look at things far away using two cubesats. Their design will use one as a telescope some optics and a good detector and the other cubesat will stand off about 20 meters, as they plan, and function as a coronagraph. The coronagraph cubesat will function as a sun mask, an occulting disk to block out the bright rays from the surface of the Sun so that the cubesat telescope can look with high resolution at the corona and the edge ofthe Sun. To these engineers, the challenge is keeping the two cubesats accurately aligned and pointing at their target.
Only dedicated Sun observing space telescopes such asSDO, STEREO and SOHO are capable of blocking out the Sun, but their coronagraphs are limited. Separating the coronagraph farther from the optics markedly improves how closely one can look at the edge of a bright object. Withthe corongraph mask closer to the optics, more bright light will still reach the optics and detectors and flood out what you really want to see. The technology Shah and his colleagues develop can be a pathfinder for future space telescopes that will search for distant planets around other stars also using a coronagraph to reveal the otherwise hidden planets.
The engineers have received a$8.6-million investment from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) and are working in collaboration withthe Maryland-based Emergent Space Technologies.
An example of a 3U cubesat 3 1U cubes stacked. This cubesat size could function as the telescope of a two cubesat telescope system. It could be a simple 10 cm diameter optic system or use fancier folding optics to improve its resolving power. (Credit: LLNL)
The challenge of GSFC engineers is giving two small cubesats guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) as good as any standard spacecraft that has flown. They plan on using off-the-shelf technology and there are many small and even large companies developing and selling cubesat parts.
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On a hot August Earth night in 2012, NASAs Curiosity rover began its celebrated seven minutes of terror slowing from 12,600 mph to a triumphant gentle landing at Mars Gale Crater.
The engineering feat of sending this pickup truck-sized rover rocketing through Mars thin atmosphere on a years-long mission to its surface instilled most Americans with newfound pride. And it made those of us who grew up with Apollo a little wistful.
Rob Manning the man arguably at the center of it all has documented both the acrobatics needed to enable the rover to slow itself to land and the decade of design and testing that led up to this moment in Mars Rover Curiosity: An Inside Account from Curiositys Chief Engineer.
Mannings just published account of years at NASAs venerable Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), co-written with best-selling non-fiction author William L. Simon, will resonate most with those who want an excellent inside take on the rigorous and often arduous task of designing interplanetary landers and the eureka moments that affords.
Courtesy Smithsonian Books
Manning deserves credit for bringing his own sense of candor and humility to the prose, even if the book sometimes lacks the kind of narrative verve that might have given it broader appeal.
The promise of science with the rovers ten instruments notwithstanding, a large part of the book addresses the mantra of EDL Entry, Descent and Landing.
After all, if Manning and his JPL colleagues cant land safely on the Martian surface, the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission and a decade of design work and years of potential science will disappear with it.
[Mars] has too much atmosphere to land as we do on the moon and not enough to land as we do on Earth, the authors write. We have to combine all of the tricks we use to land on Earth (heat shields, parachutes) with the techniques we use to land on the Moon (retro rockets, air bags), among many others.
But if anything, live coverage of the missions Entry, Descent and Landing with continual social media reporting from the JPL control room, made us all realize how much times had changed since NASAs Viking 1 landed on Mars some forty years earlier. I personally streamed Curiositys landing at a local Starbucks. Within minutes after the landing at 10:30 pm PDT August 5, the authors note, images taken from the front and rear hazcams arrived at JPL, giving startling visceral proof to our anxious team that Curiosity had landed on Mars. With Mt. Sharp a few kilometers to the south,
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Midtown International School Solar Astronomy Oct 16th 2014
Please share these videos freely... Its about Science! Please support The Charlie Bates Solar Astronomy Project with your tax deductible donation at http://www.char...
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Midtown International School Solar Astronomy Oct 16th 2014 - Video
Astronomy C13 - 2014-10-21: From the Big Bang to Habitable Planets
Astronomy C13, 001 - Fall 2014 Origins: from the Big Bang to the Emergence of Humans - Charles Marshall, Eliot Quataert All Rights Reserved.
By: UCBerkeley
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Astronomy C13 - 2014-10-21: From the Big Bang to Habitable Planets - Video
Astronomy Live - Comet Siding Spring Recap - Misconceptions and Anomalies
This video is by Astronomy Live (shared with permission). Astronomy Live #39;s channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/messierhunter/featured Original video by Astronomy Live: https://www.youtube.com/w.
By: dazzathecameraman
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Astronomy Live - Comet Siding Spring Recap - Misconceptions and Anomalies - Video
Space oddity: The Big Ear radio telescope was part of Ohio University's program to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and was used for this purpose from 1973 to 1995.
Making a hole in one is tough the chances for such a golf shot are about 1 in 12,500. The chances of a radio telescope randomly picking up a signal from another civilisation in space are far more remote than that.
The irony of this is that a radio telescope that picked up our best bet for such a signal has been dismantled and developers turned it into a golf course!
The Big Ear radio telescope was part of Ohio University's program to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and was used for this purpose from 1973 to 1995.
It was big, taking up an area about the size of the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
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The telescope became internationally famous in the late 1970s because of what's now known as the "Wow! Signal" registered by the observatory's recorders.
On August 15, 1977, Jerry Ehman a volunteer at the Big Ear, was routinely glancing over the computer printouts of the telescope's recent observations when he spotted something astounding. It was the recording of a radio signal lasting 72 seconds, so strong it went off of the scale. He circled it in red, writing the word "Wow!" beside it.
Its intensity was unprecedented and it stood out forcefully from the regular "natural" radio emissions received by the telescope.
Unfortunately the density of stars in the area from which the signal came is extremely high not far from the galactic centre, near the "handle" of the Sagittarius teapot asterism, and researchers could not pinpoint its origin to a particular star.
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Live animals. A mad scientist. A walk in the prairie, and an astronomy lesson. The National Homestead Monument of America has all the makings of a fun and educational event this weekend.
Saturday marks the Monuments 18th annual Howling Homestead. The Monument has hosted the Halloween-themed event free-of-charge since 1997. Park Superintendent Mark Engler said with an average of 350-450 attendees annually, Howling Homestead is one of the Monuments best-attended events of the year.
This years festivities start at 6 p.m. Saturday at the Monuments Heritage Center. Engler encouraged families to arrive early.
The first 100 kids will get a free pumpkin, he said. I like to call these pumpkins two-arm pumpkins, because theyre pretty good-sized pumpkins. The pumpkins are being provided by The Friends of Homestead. The Friends of Homestead have been doing this throughout the years that weve been doing our Howling Homestead event. Were very grateful for the work that they do.
Engler said the event will be broken up into stations, with Monument employees and volunteers assisting attendees along the way.
When visitors arrive, we ask them to get a card, Engler explained. Well assign them a group with this card. Theyre assigned to that group throughout the evening. We have volunteers and employees who stay with that group, and they rotate from station to station.
Engler said groups will spend roughly 10-12 minutes at each station.
One of the most popular stations features a lesson on some scary animals lurking around the prairie.
Theyll learn about snakes, Engler said. Theyll learn about raptors. Theyll learn about bats.
Visitors will also have the opportunity to perform experiments with a mad scientist.
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NASA Hangout about Comets and astronomy with Living Maths
NASA Deputy Chief Technologist Jim Adams, Astronomers Dr Padma Yanamandra-Fisher, Dr Henry Throop and a few local astronomers spoke about Comets, Mars and everything in between.
By: Steve Sherman
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NASA Hangout about Comets and astronomy with Living Maths - Video