Archival jackpot

Brandon’s post concerning Galaxy Zoo was a great reminder of the programs available for anyone and everyone to be involved in the astronomical discovery process. There was a recent Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD) submitted by a philosophy professor that compiled four images from the Voyager spacecraft (on August 24, 1989). The image is included as Figure 1 this post, but can also be found here.

Figure 1. Neptune's moon, Despina, casts a shado on the gas giant. Image compiled from 4 archival images from the Voyager spacecraft by Ted Stryk (a philosophy professor).

There is just so much astronomical data out there! And many of the publically-funded projects are required to release the data and images for public use—yes, anyone can use it. This data is referred to as archival. For example, the Hubble Space Telescope has its site where you can download thousands of images and lots of archived data. Many other space and ground-based telescopes have archived their data. And this is not just a fun thing for the public; it is also very convenient for astronomy researchers as well. I have read many papers that have solely used this archived data for their analysis. Brian Kloppenborg, who received his PhD from DU a couple of years ago, was able to find almost 200 years of archived data on the star system he was studying, epsilon Aurigae. The data wasn’t exactly ideal, but it is hard to beat the amount of time epsilon Aurigae has been observed. Funny thing about that object: we still have dozens of questions! So, not all the answers will be found there, but it should be helpful.

I guess this is a plug for both public citizens and astronomy researchers to use the available archives. I need to use it more in my own research. It is a great resource and provides lots of evidence for observation proposals, eg I need to observe [object] at [wavelength], especially because there is no equivalent archival data.

Has anyone effectively used the archives in their research?

Tales from a Traveling Graduate Student

Forest Shrine, Asaina, Japan

Have you ever wanted to travel? To see the world? Me too. I just didn't think that my ticket to another continent or even another city would be through graduate school. This is likely because when I thought of graduate school, I thought of long nights toiling with long problem sets, grading, coding, debugging code, whiny undergraduates, writing more code, and just overall hopelessness that I will never get out of graduate school. 

Now, don't get me wrong, graduate school is a long arduous process which should take serious thought before deciding to do it (PhD Comics has a nice way to make the turmoil funny), I just want to point out one of the benefits (yes, there are benefits) of being a graduate student; traveling. 

Post climb of Mount Fuji, Japan.

Before I get into the details, I should tell you a little about myself since this is my first blog post. My name is Rachael Tomasino and I am a 3rd year Astrophysics graduate student at the University of Denver.  I enjoy running, knitting, and playing with my two dogs; a siberian husky and a border collie mix. While working, I study the circumstellar material around late stage evolved low mass stars. In short, I study dust. Check out this paper about one of my objects; the Cygnus Egg Nebula.

Back to the interesting part; traveling. Below is a picture of me in front to the SkyTree; the worlds tallest building located in Tokyo, Japan. How did I ever end up in Japan? Answer: graduate school.

SkyTree, Tokyo, Japan

As a graduate student, I was able to apply for an East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute Fellowship. With this fellowship, I was able to create an international collaboration with the Laboratory for Infrared Astrophysics (LIRA) group working at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) in Sagamihara, Japan. I spent a total of 10 weeks living and working at ISAS. During that time, I was not only able to get a lot of work done but also had various opportunities to travel around and see different parts of Japan including spending a weekend at the Okayama Astrophysical Observatory while discussing work with the director, seeing a sumo tournament in Nagoya, and also climbing Mount Fuji.

Since my fellowship summer, I have traveled back to Japan two more times! I went back to continue working with my collaborators, give a talk, and to present a poster a conference.

I should note that extended traveling for a fellowship is not the most common way for a graduate student to leave the depths of their office. Most of the time, it will be to travel to a conference. Conferences are an amazing and exhausting experience and they are great way to travel because they are (usually) free. (Thank you grant money!)

Presenting at the APS-4CS in Denver

Since the start of graduate school, I have been to two international conferences (SPICA in Japan and APN VI in Mexico) and a handful of conferences within the United States. Including: AAS in Long Beach, APS-4CS in Socorro and Denver, and CUWip in Golden, CO. (If you are overwhelmed by the acronyms, welcome to astronomy.) Conferences are a great way to meet people and also have your work gain exposure which could lead to more collaborations and exciting new projects!

There are thousands of opportunities to participate in conferences all over the globe no matter your area of interest. If you are interested in finding one near (or far) from you, check out this website or ask your advisor/faculty in your department and enjoy!

Cheers and happy traveling,

Rachael

A Zoo of Galaxies?

My name is Brandon Kuschel, and I am a first year grad student at the University of Denver.  I study the behavior of dust around evolved stars using hydrodynamic models.

Rather than jumping right into describing my current work in detail, I'd like to start by plugging for a topic that I have been passionate about for quite a while: citizen science.  One of the largest such projects, along with being one of my personal favorites, is Galaxy Zoo.

Galaxy Zoo allows anyone to help with the classification of galaxies by their appearance.  As described in their history here, the site has been around since 2007.  At first, the team behind the site just asked volunteers to perform a basic classification.  They had the option to choose whether the image contained an elliptical galaxy, a spiral galaxy, or two galaxies merging.  After the initial project was complete, the team relaunched the site and called it (creatively enough) Galaxy Zoo 2.  This time, they asked for additional classification, mostly specific to spiral galaxies.  These questions included counting the number of spiral arms, giving the relative size of the central bulge, and saying whether or not the galaxy had a bar.

One big question you might have about Galaxy Zoo is why does it exist at all?  How could a team of researchers trust results they get from the Internet?  The Galaxy Zoo science pages located here and here provide an answer.  Data for Galaxy Zoo comes primarily from a photographic map of the universe called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or SDSS.  In the first phase of the project alone, there were 1.5 million galaxies to classify, far too many for a small group to handle.  By having multiple people look at each image, the team was able to get results just as good as if they had looked at all the images themselves.

More recent phases of Galaxy Zoo allow people to peer back into the early universe through images from Hubble's CANDELS survey.  However, no matter where the images come from, the appeal remains the same.  Participating in Galaxy Zoo allows members of the general public to be the first person-or at least one of the first few people-to see a galaxy.  Not only that, but the project has contributed data for numerous papers and led to follow-up observations on larger telescopes.

With the popularity of Galaxy Zoo, its creators decided to expand on the concept and create what they called the Zooniverse (I'll give them credit for creativity on that one).  This website includes projects with a similar idea that anyone can contribute to solve a large problem in topics as far ranging as climate science to biology/nature.  It also includes even more astronomy-related projects such as watching for solar storms, hunting for exoplanets, finding young stars, finding gravitational lenses, and matching gas jets to feeding black holes.

365 Days of Astronomy

I just saw that the 365 Days of Astronomy project will continue in 2014! This daily astronomy podcast was started in 2009 for the International Year of Astronomy and has been going strong ever since.  Check it out for your daily dose of celestial conversation!

Astro:Rad students: want to contribute? The podcast is looking for content:

For this upcoming year, the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast is looking for individuals, organizations, schools, companies, and clubs to sign-up for their 5-60 minutes of audio for the new daily podcast which will be aired on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday.

More info is here. Maybe we could do something as a class?

Impact of Astronomy in Technology

Impact of Astronomy in Technology

Hi my name is Manisha Shrestha. I am a second year graduate student at University of Denver. My research involves understanding the polarization characteristic of stellar bow shock. I hope to be talking more about this in later posts.
A lot of times when we talk about the research in Astronomy, there are people who want to know the importance of this research. How is it going to advance our technologies? When we think about it, the same questions are not asked to a painter for example. A painter creates a painting, and we don't look at it ask about it's importance. We just appreciate its beauty. But when it comes to the branch of science, we want to see how its study is going to affect our day to day lives.
So I thought for the first few blogs I will talk about some of the inventions done by research in astronomy. I will start with the technology called aperture synthesis which is used in computerized tomography (CT). This technology is widely used in medical field.

A CT scanner www.manalihospital.com

Aperture synthesis is a process in which they take signals from various telescopes at same angular resolutions and produce an image. This technology was developed by Nobel Laureate Martin Ryle. Similar technology is used in CT, where series of two dimensional images are used to produce three dimensional image. This makes the study of internal organ easier in medicine. 
Also the programming language developed by astronomy such as IDL, IRAF is widely used in processing images in medicine.
Benefits of astronomy research is far more in technologies than we think of. Astronomy helps to improve the technologies directly as well as indirectly. I will be talking about other advances in technologies due to astronomy in my other posts.

Tiny Neutrinos and Giant Supernovae

I'm Rebecca, a second year grad student at the University of Denver.  I study Planetary Nebulae, which are late-life intermediate-mass stars.  I'm specifically interested in how the material around these stars is is shaped.

Right now I'm working on my Comprehensive Exam (writing a paper on a topic outside of my normal research area) which focuses on neutrino oscillations.  In the early stages of my research (in which I was trying to just get the hang of neutrinos in general), I ran across this pretty neat article from the xkcd team.  It talks about neutrino doses from supernovae (in a really user-friendly, cartoony way) and is a pretty interesting reminder of just how inconsequential neutrinos are to our bodies, and just how giant supernovae are.  Enjoy!

http://what-if.xkcd.com/73/

Aurorae and cats

My name is Richard Pearson; I'm a PhD candidate working under Dr. Robert Stencel. I am sure you will hear more about the work I am doing on this blog later, but here is the one liner (and associated links): epsilon Aurigae is an eclipsing binary system with a circumstellar disk of which I am performing radiative transfer modeling analysis to clarify the system's many unknowns. I will be posting under the Pearson Fam name. I don't know if that is proper blog etiquette or not, but that's how it's going to be. I'll make a comment on our family blog about And There Was Light to see if we can round up some outside readers.

I am currently assisting with some of the Chamberlin Observatory duties, one of which includes returning phone calls from people asking about random events occurring the sky. Recently, many have called wondering about the aurora borealis due to the recent solar flare activity. With the large outbursts, it was possible for the Northern lights to make its way down to Colorado. Sadly, it didn't happen, but it is always intriguing to hear how much public interest there is in “the sky.” It seems to be an innate desire for understanding—or at least participation/viewing—of what is going on above humanity’s head. It is no wonder so many cultures in the past studied the heavens so deeply. My interest, especially in the aurora borealis, stemmed from an experience in elementary school.

My grandfather performed many studies of the aurora borealis as an atmospheric scientist. When I was in Mrs. Crawford’s fourth-grade class, my grandfather came to my class and proposed an experiment: he would provide us with vegetable seeds flown through the aurora borealis in a rocket. We were to take those seeds and compare their growth to a set that had not been exposed. Our class was totally stoked about “helping”. We saw no noticeable differences over the months of observing. At summer break, I took the experiment home, still with great hopes of discovering something grand. Within a day, our two cats had eaten the plants and ruined my ground-breaking results for the world. Looking back, I am not sure how much my class could have “helped” further atmospheric science, but it was a fun thing to be a part of…but I think my grandfather still hates those cats.

SpaceWeather.com monitors the activity of the Sun and its interactions with Earth. On the left-most column they provide a list of Current Conditions which includes the following (this is not a complete list): solar wind speed and density, sunspot image, aurora activity, coronal hole activity, and space weather forecasts. I have included an image of the Current Auroral Oval (dated 2014 January 13 04:13UT = 09:13 MST) in Figure 1. This shows a graphical representation of the flux around the polar regions; notice the edge of the “measurable” and/or “plot-able” auroral oval just reaches the top of Colorado’s state line. The main activity is, of course, closer to the pole.

Figure 1.

The Planetary K-index is used to portray how “deep” the aurora reaches. Figure 2 is from SpaceWeather’s K-index definition, retrieved from Sky & Telescope (June 1968). By comparing the data in the current auroral oval with the K-index figure, the high-activity region is within the K=3 range. The monitoring service states that it has peaked up to K=4 within a 24-hour period, but that it was actually hovering around a K=1-2 range. It really is too bad the show didn't make it further south.

Figure 2.

The public wants to know and be a part of big events; many are astrophysical. Even a fourth-grade class can feel like a part of something big. Can you think of creative ways to incorporate the public in your work? Are there hidden ways to help others get excited about what you do? Just remember: do not let your cats near aurora borealis-ized vegetable plants.