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Astronomy celebs come out at Starry Nights

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Leslie Shaw Hi-Desert Star

Southern California Desert Video Astronomers member Tom O'Key sets up his solar telescope so Deavah Woodley of Landers can have a look at the sun.

Posted: Tuesday, September 30, 2014 4:29 pm

Astronomy celebs come out at Starry Nights By Leslie Shaw Hi-Desert Star Hi-Desert Star |

YUCCA MESA World-famous astronomy experts spoke at the 18th annual Starry Nights Festival Saturday at the Yucca Mesa Improvement Associations community center.

Astronomer and author David Levy offered copies of his new book, a biography about Bart Bok entitled The Man Who Sold the Milky Way. A familiar face to regular Starry Nights participants, Levy is the sole discoverer of two comets and the co-discoverer of seven more comets.

Tim Hunter, a co-founder of the International Dark-Sky Association joined amateur astronomer Mary Firth and Los Angeles City College professors Dean Ardvidson and Paul McCudden to give a star tour in the evening.

Tom OKey, a member of the Southern California Desert Video Astronomers, set up his solar telescope so daytime visitors could see the sun and its spots.

Visitors to Yucca Mesa got to see the night sky through telescopes and a large projection screen thanks to members of the Southern California Desert Video Astronomers. The group also provided experts for a telescope workshop where visitors could be trained in the use of their own telescopes.

Danny and Gina Esheverria, from the restaurant Proud Spirit No Borders in Banning, sold food including fried bread tacos.

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Astronomy celebs come out at Starry Nights

E.O. Wilson Chases The 'Great Riddle' Of Human Existence

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With a title as audacious as The Meaning of Human Existence, even a casual reader couldnt be faulted for expecting a veritable Rosetta Stone to the cosmos and life as we know it. But in his latest book, Edward O. Wilson offers no philosophically-satisfying answers to this age-old existence question. And maybe thats his point.

After all, the ability to ponder our own existence is all at once a blessing and a curse. Neither sharks nor swallows seem to worry about too much more than their next meal. Yet in fifteen chapters, Wilson a renowned biologist, naturalist, author and Harvard University professor emeritus, strips humanity of its soul.

Wilson is steadfastly averse to spiritual intangibles; somewhat skeptical about ever fully understanding consciousness, yet overly sanguine about cosmologys progress in understanding the nature of the universe. He also spends a significant portion of the book trashing organized religion in ways that in this atheistic age at least seem both arbitrary and predictable.

Instead, Wilson advocates a larger role for a reciprocal meeting of the minds between the humanities and science itself.

Courtesy W.W. Norton

The time has come to consider what science might give to the humanities and the humanities to science in a common search to the great riddle of our existence, writes Wilson.

In some ways he may have a point lifes intangibles bubble to the surface whenever I see a well-acted scene from Chekhovs The Cherry Orchard or hear a well-played steel guitar.

And to his credit, Wilson offers the kind of grand sweeping essays that we usually get piecemeal in books typically written by theoretical physicists pondering the imponderables.

We were created not by a supernatural intelligence but by chance and necessity as one species out of millions of species in earths biosphere, Wilson argues. Humanity arose as an accident of evolution, a product of random mutation and natural selection.

But except for those who view evolution along the narrowest terms, do chance and necessity and supernatural intelligence have to be mutually exclusive?

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E.O. Wilson Chases The 'Great Riddle' Of Human Existence

Astronomy data bounty spurs debate over access

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David Nunuk/Getty

Smaller telescopes will be needed to investigate events spotted by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

Now under construction atop a mountain in northern Chile, the 8.36-metre Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will sweep the entire southern sky every three nights when it starts operating in 2022 creating a wealth of data that will be available to all US astronomers and dozens of international partners. It promises to be a democratizing force and to usher in a new era of survey astronomy.

But that promise could go unrealized without the proper infrastructure, astronomers warn. Without access to the tools and facilities needed to analyse the huge data set and to do follow-up observations, many astronomers could be locked out of the bounty. Especially vulnerable are researchers and students at small and minority-serving institutions, which often find it hard to secure telescope time.

The US National Science Foundation (NSF), which is footing the telescopes US$473-million construction bill, has commissioned a National Research Council (NRC) panel to formulate a strategy that maximizes the scientific return of the LSST. It is a complicated problem, says the panels chair, Debra Elmegreen. To help it decide, the panel has asked astronomers to provide input by 6October on how they intend to use the LSST and what support they would need to be able to do so. The panels report is due early next year.

A big part of the facilitys appeal is that it will detect unexpected events such as supernovae or stars being swallowed by black holes but exploring details such as their composition and temperature will require access to other ground-based telescopes. Large US research universities typically have private access to such telescopes, but small ones tend to rely on public instruments, which are under threat from budget cuts. In 2012, a panel recommended that the NSF divest itself of several facilities, which would halve the number of nights open to visiting observers. The agency plans to follow the recommendation, but has been delayed by a budget stalemate in the US Congress.

Another common concern is that analysing big data sets requires correspondingly large computing resources. The LSST will collect so much data (30 terabytes per night) that few small institutions will have the capability to analyse the information directly. Youre not going to copy the whole LSST data set, says Joshua Pepper, an astronomer at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. Even a subset is beyond the range of a professor and an office desktop.

One solution is to create an online portal that would let astronomers mine the database remotely. There is a smaller-scale precedent: the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which uses a 2.5-metre telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Its portal enables anyone to view and filter the telescopes output; as a result, the data have been used in more than 5,800 publications that have been cited 245,000 times.

LSST director Steven Kahn notes that there have always been plans for an online portal. But the flow of data will be so massive that even basic processing is an enormous job, says Keivan Stassun, an astronomer with joint appointments at Vanderbilt University and Fisk University, both in Nashville, Tennessee, who chairs the SDSS executive committee. The LSST will collect more data in three nights than the entire SDSS catalogue, so Stassun worries that despite its best intentions, the LSST could find itself lacking resources. Thats not a criticism of LSST; its a statement of capacity, he says.

The make-up of the NRC panel has also raised eyebrows. The only member from a small institution is Elmegreen, an astronomer at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Because the panels main remit is to maximize the LSSTs scientific return, she considers its primary mission to be ensuring wide availability of data. Im a little bit conflicted, she says, because Id like to make sure that everyone has access to telescopes. But the big push today is to make sure that people have access to data.

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Astronomy data bounty spurs debate over access

Astronomy – Ch. 5: Light & E&M Radiation (5 of 30) How Are E&M Waves Produced? – Video

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Astronomy - Ch. 5: Light E M Radiation (5 of 30) How Are E M Waves Produced?
Visit http://ilectureonline.com for more math and science lectures! In this video I will answer the questions, How is electromagnetic radiation produced?

By: Michel van Biezen

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Astronomy - Ch. 5: Light & E&M Radiation (5 of 30) How Are E&M Waves Produced? - Video

Astronomy – Ch. 5: Light & E&M Radiation (8 of 30) E&M Radiation…Safe or Dangerous? – Video

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Astronomy - Ch. 5: Light E M Radiation (8 of 30) E M Radiation...Safe or Dangerous?
Visit http://ilectureonline.com for more math and science lectures! In this video I will explain which electromagnetic radiation is dangerous and which are s...

By: Michel van Biezen

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Astronomy - Ch. 5: Light & E&M Radiation (8 of 30) E&M Radiation...Safe or Dangerous? - Video

'Milky Way explorer' tours the solar system

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Imagine seeing the Sun, planets, and a myriad other objects in our Solar System as you have never seen them before -- in invisible radio light! That is the experience you will get through the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's (NRAO) newly released Solar System installment of its popular Milky Way Explorer, an online tour of our interstellar neighborhood guided by the actual astronomers who explore it using radio waves.

Through an entertaining and informative series of videos, NRAO's Science Visualization Team presents multimedia-rich tours of the radio Sun as well as many of the planets, moons, and asteroids that orbit it. At each stop along the way, planetary radio astronomers reveal the new science and exciting details we have learned about our Solar System neighbors through the use of radio telescopes.

Unlike familiar optical telescopes, which can only study objects illuminated by our Sun and other stars, radio telescopes can see the otherwise invisible cold, dark features in space. This includes the faint radio light that is naturally emitted by the molecules and chemicals that make up the atmospheres of planets and certain moons in our Solar System.

Radio dishes, when paired with powerful radar transmitters on Earth, can also reveal hidden landscapes, such as the Moon's dust-layered surface and Venus's alien features shrouded behind its thick clouds.

The Milky Way Explorer, which was launched in 2013, also includes dozens more videos showcasing the diverse radio astronomy studies of our spiral island of stars, stellar nurseries, and dark matter. A third set of interviews and animations is scheduled for 2015 to share more radio astronomy discoveries made inside our Galaxy and among the nearest neighboring galaxies of our Universe.

https://public.nrao.edu/explorer/milkyway/TheMilkyWayExplorer.php

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

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The above story is based on materials provided by National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

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'Milky Way explorer' tours the solar system

NASA's WISE Mission Shuffles Sun's Nearest Stellar Neighbors

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For decades, the ten stars closest to our own Sun made a pretty static list. Ideas about where to send the first interstellar probes tended to focus on the same three or four star systems which all lie well within ten light years.

But in the last few years,

NASAs WISE spacecraft, in particular, has caused celestial cartographers to redraw their star maps to include recently discovered cooler and lower mass stars and even brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs are conventionally defined as stellar-type objects from between 13 to 74 Jupiter masses that are simply too small to ignite thermonuclear burning of hydrogen in their cores. However, some brown dwarfs are thought to burn deuterium.

Artists conception of the binary system WISE J104915.57-531906 with the Sun in the background. Credit: Janella Williams, Penn State University.

The new third and fourth nearest stellar objects are now known to actually be cool brown dwarfs found last year with WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission data.

Id like to visit Wise1049-5319 and Wise0855-0714 most because I discovered them, said Kevin Luhman, an astronomer at Penn State University. Wise1049-5319 is a binary system in which the companions have masses of roughly 50 times the mass of Jupiter, he says, and as far as we know, Wise0855-0714 is a single object with a probable mass between 3 and 10 times the mass of Jupiter.

Its surface temperature is similar to the North Pole, making it the coldest object seen outside the solar system, probably with clouds of water ice in its atmosphere, said Luhman. If a probe visited either system, one would want it to come within one [Earth-Sun] distance or less to study these brown dwarfs in detail.

But undoubtedly the first stop would be nearby Proxima Centauri at only 4.2 light years away in the Alpha Centauri star system. As an M-spectral type red dwarf, it remains closest known star to earth, but is widely-separated from Alpha Centauri A & B the next nearest stars to Earth.

At only 6 light years away, Barnards star in the constellation of Ophiuchus is the second closest stellar system to Earth. And although this high-velocity red dwarf star has a long history of astronomers who have claimed that it harbors planets. No such detections have thus far been corroborated, however.

The nearest stars are still the G, M, and K spectral types, says Davy Kirkpatrick, an infrared astronomer at Caltech. But when you start getting to twenty down the list in terms of distance, he says, you start picking up L and T brown dwarfs, about the radius of Jupiter, that werent known to exist 15 years ago.

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NASA's WISE Mission Shuffles Sun's Nearest Stellar Neighbors

Astronomy – Ch. 5: Light & E&M Radiation (6 of 30) Difference of E&M Frequence – Video

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Astronomy - Ch. 5: Light E M Radiation (6 of 30) Difference of E M Frequence
Visit http://ilectureonline.com for more math and science lectures! In this video I will explain the different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation.

By: Michel van Biezen

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Astronomy - Ch. 5: Light & E&M Radiation (6 of 30) Difference of E&M Frequence - Video

More Prophecy Mostly from Revelation, Biblical Astronomy too, Sept 26, 2014 – Video

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More Prophecy Mostly from Revelation, Biblical Astronomy too, Sept 26, 2014
Read some ICBM Falsehoods http://www.space.com/19601-how-intercontinental-ballistic-missiles-work-infographic.html ICBM Nonsense https://www.youtube.com/watc...

By: EndTimesUSAisBabylon Third Temple Watch

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More Prophecy Mostly from Revelation, Biblical Astronomy too, Sept 26, 2014 - Video

Astronomy – Ch. 5: Light & E&M Radiation (9 of 30) How Does the Atmosphere Protect Us? – Video

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Astronomy - Ch. 5: Light E M Radiation (9 of 30) How Does the Atmosphere Protect Us?
Visit http://ilectureonline.com for more math and science lectures! In this video I will explain how we are protected from the dangerous radiations from space.

By: Michel van Biezen

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Astronomy - Ch. 5: Light & E&M Radiation (9 of 30) How Does the Atmosphere Protect Us? - Video


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