Lucy!

No, not that Lucy... THIS Lucy! The date of March 11 has become a "seeing things with my own eyes that I never thought I would see with my own eyes" day. Six years ago on March 11, I was standing in Pompeii. This year, I saw Lucy.

Yes, we finally did our road trip to the Houston Museum of Natural Science on Tuesday to visit Texas' most famous 3.2 million-year-old visitor. The exhibit opened last August and closes at the end of April, so we didn't have a whole lot of time left. I think that waiting a while was a good move, since it wasn't very crowded there on a Tuesday afternoon during Spring Break. For a while we practically had the Lucy room to ourselves (save the docent and security guard and a couple with a little girl).

Obviously Lucy was the main draw, but she wasn't the only thing on exhibit from Ethiopia. From pre-historic times, they had some 1.6 million year old hand axes and some nice replica fossils and skulls of other species of hominids from the area. They also had lots of cultural artifacts, especially Christian processional crosses (some of which had some very intricate metal and woodwork on them) and an interesting collection of coins. They also had photos and a model of one of the amazing rock-cut churches in Ethiopia.

We skipped the exhibit movies, although I kind of wish now that we had watched the "introduction to Ethiopia" one at the beginning. I have to admit that I didn't know a whole lot about the country beyond the fact that it was mostly left alone by European colonial powers (probably due to its long history of Christianity) and that they export a lot of coffee. And of course that it is a rich source of ancient hominid fossils. There was an introduction to Lucy video that we also skipped, mostly since I've read both "Lucy" and "Lucy's Child" and know a fair amount about her discovery. They also had her namesake song - The Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" - playing in the outer room. I was mystified that someone actually complained about that in the comment book at the exit. Maybe they missed the connection and just thought the museum was being cute...

The "Lucy room" as I've decided to call it, was surrounded by a magnificent mural of human evolution from our probable common ancestor with chimpanzees (approx. 6 million years ago) to early Homo sapiens, with explanatory text below it. Lucy herself was in a horizontal case in the middle of the room, with a full-size life-like reconstruction of her in a case nearby. On the wall next to the original fossils was a vertically-mounted replica with the bones placed three-dimensionally in their correct anatomical position. This was very helpful, since you lose the depth information with the way the original fossil is displayed.

I would have liked to have seen some comparative anatomy in the exhibit. The docent on hand did a good job of describing how some parts of Lucy are more human-like and some parts are more chimp-like, but it would have been nice to have a visual reference. I also think they were trying their best to dispel the "if humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" creationist canard. Of course, if you know anything about human evolution, that's a totally silly argument. But I'm guessing that a lot of the people visiting Lucy don't know that "common ape-like ancestor" is what a scientist would say, not that "man evolved from apes". So, they seemed to be careful about how they were phrasing Lucy's place with relation to modern man and apes (chimps in particular). (Although I would point out that the eLucy site does just that... it allows you to pick a bone of Lucy's and see it side-by-side with a modern man and modern chimp).

I would like to compliment the museum for allowing people to get a really good, close view of Lucy in her case. They could have displayed her in a way that kept the people at a distance or behind ropes, but thankfully that wasn't what they did. The case was horizontal, about 3 feet off the ground, and you could get right up along side it, lean over it and look through the sides. And I did. Again, and again. I'm not sure how long I loitered, but I decided to drink in as much of the view as I could. The odds of me ever seeing her again are slim so I tried to make the most of the time we had there.

I know there has been criticism and controversy over transporting such priceless fossils, but I'm so glad that Lucy is visiting the States. First, it was probably the only way I was ever going to get a chance to see her, and second, in a nation where a large fraction of people don't believe in human evolution, or evolution at all, it is important for one of our best pieces of evidence of evolution to be available for people to see with their own eyes. Unfortunately it wasn't convincing to everybody, judging by the "It's all lies" statement I saw in the comment book, but the majority of notes were far more complimentary. I don't know how many people might have their minds changed by seeing Lucy, but even if it is just a few, it's worth it. And for people like me, it was an amazing opportunity to see in person an important piece of the story of human evolution.

Archive Post: Carl Sagan on a stamp!

Well, hopefully!

From the Cornell Chronicle:

A movement to immortalize famed Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan with a U.S. postage stamp was launched Feb. 11 for local media at the Ithaca Sciencenter.

Patrick Fish, founder of the Utica-based grassroots Sagan Appreciation Society, and Charles Trautmann, executive director of the Sciencenter, unveiled four renderings by three artists or artist teams of proposed Sagan memorial stamps that the society plans to submit to the U.S. Postal Service for commissioning.

You can read the full article and see the potential designs here.

Archive Post: Comet Holmes!

I have been meaning to post something about this very interesting comet for a week now... better late than never, I guess.

The comet, which usually hangs out in an orbit between Mars and Jupiter, had already made its closest pass by the sun (which wasn't all that close) and was heading back out, orbiting happily along at 17th magnitude. For those of you unfamiliar with the astronomical magnitude scale - that's VERY faint (about 24,000 times fainter than what you can see with the unaided eye). Then, on the night of October 23rd, it suddenly got bright. VERY bright. Over all, it ended up increasing about a million times in brightness in a day or two, probably from an outgassing event.

I was running the regular open house on one of the campus telescopes last Wednesday and decided to give the comet a look at the end of the night. I really had no idea what to expect, especially from the middle of Austin, with a nearly full moon, a large football stadium with all of its lights on and more sports fields about 20 blocks away (which always color the northern sky a bright yellow-orange when viewed from our building). I punched in the coordinates and moved the telescope over and climbed up to look in the eyepiece. I saw a bright, fuzzy blob in there and figured I needed to refocus the telescope with the new eyepiece I had slipped in. But, when I looked around the field a little, I realized there was a nicely-focussed star in the corner of the field, meaning the bright fuzzy blob was the comet! I was totally, amazed since I had never seen anything quite like it before. I wasn't very familiar with the constellation of Perseus, so I didn't realize until someone pointed it out that there was an extra "star" in it, clearly visible to the naked eye even in the middle of Austin.

I have been looking at it almost every night since, mostly just with binoculars and my unaided eyes, and it has been changing quite a bit over the week since the outburst. It is now distinctly fuzzy to the naked eye and disc-like in binoculars. The outer shell of gas has been expanding, so it has appeared to grow dimmer but it is now much larger.

I decided to try to photograph the comet last night with the telescope and the digital camera from the office and got a couple of decent photos (including the one up top). You can see both of the photos here. And you can see lots of other photos on SpaceWeather.com. Be sure to look at the finder charts and to go out and have a look yourself!

Archive Post: Confessions of a Nobel Prize junkie

Yep, it's true, I'm a Nobel Prize junkie. I eagerly await the announcements every year, especially Physics and Peace. This year the Nobel folks set up RSS feeds so you can find out almost instantly when the prizes are announced (provided you are sitting at your computer in the early morning hours US time) and have links to videos of the announcements, summaries of the work the prizes are awarded for, etc. They have more info on the prizes and my favorite sections - "Memories of the magic call".

So, given this, you can imagine how thrilled I was to be able to sit and chat briefly with last year's Physics co-winner, John Mather, who was here to give a couple of lectures and receive the Antoinette de Vaucouleurs memorial medal. Like an idiot though, I forgot to ask him about "getting the call"! D'oh! I also have never asked Steven Weinberg about his call for some reason. Well, if he asks me to help him with graphics for a Power Point presentation again, I'll have to turn into a fangirl and ask him. :)

And yes, I was very pleased with this morning's announcement of the Peace Prize, given jointly to Al Gore and the IPCC. To show what a total Nobel geek I am, we typically flip the TV on as soon as the alarm goes off and turn it over to the news. Knowing that the announcement was made about two hours before we got up, I instantly started reading the "crawl" across the bottom of the screen (something that usually annoys the heck out of me but was quite useful this time!). About the third or fourth story that came across started "Vice President Al Gore..." and I knew that he had won. I wonder if this the first time someone has won an Oscar and a Nobel in the same year?

And to finish my thoughts about the Physics prize in particular, it still amazes me that some of the experiments we did in the first year quantum physics lab won people Nobel prizes a century earlier. It just goes to show you how quickly science advanced in the 20th century!

Archive Post: Happy Birthday Sputnik!

I was going to say a few things about the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, but it looks like Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy already wrote a lot of stuff along the lines I was thinking!

Here's a NASA page (where I took the picture from) about the spacecraft and a Science@NASA page where you can hear the beep and learn more about communicating with spaceprobes, like the one on its way to Pluto.

Archive Post: More bragging on colleagues

We go from gigantic stars blowing up to finding the one of the oldest stars in the Galaxy! This time it is Anna Frebel, the William J. McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow and her metal poor star HE 1523-0901. Yeah, it isn't the sexiest name for a star, but that's not what's important about it. Since Phil Plait over at BadAstronomy has already boiled down the science, I'll just link to his post.

Archive Post: Big-Badda-Boom!

I've got to brag on a couple of colleagues who were mentioned in the New York Times today.

From the article:

In a cascade of superlatives that belies the traditional cerebral reserve of their profession, astronomers reported today that they had seen the brightest and most powerful stellar explosion ever recorded.
...
Astronomers have been following the star since last September, when it was discovered in a galaxy 240 million light years away in the constellation Perseus by Robert Quimby, a University of Texas graduate student, who was using a small robotic telescope at McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Tex., to troll for supernovas.
[note: one addition... Robert is a Post-Doctoral Fellow now, and still at UT]
...
“The core is still composed of explosive oxygen,” explained Craig Wheeler of the University of Texas and another of the paper’s authors. “The oxygen ignites and blows the star to smithereens with no remnant, no black hole left.”
[another note: Craig is also the current president of the American Astronomical Society]

The star up at the top of the page is Eta Carinae, which is mentioned in the article. It similar to the star that exploded, but much closer to home. If you click on the image it will take you to the press release from Hubble.

Archive Post: Mmmmmmm pi(e)

In one of the countries who typically write the month and then the day when writing out the date, someone cleverly noticed that today is 3.14 and decided it should be celebrated as Pi Day. And of course, the best way to celebrate is by eating pie, which besides being a homophone for pi is also round and therefore pi is useful for figuring out just how much pie you have. Starting a few years back some of our grad students starting bringing in pie for pi day and I'm happy to announce that tradition continues... I'm munching on a piece of apple pie right now.

And for an extra special geek bonus to the day, it is also Albert Einstein's birthday!

Archive Post: Happy Valentine's Day

The above is one of my all-time favorite images from Mars. It's actually only one of several objects on Mars that are heart-shaped, but for some reason this one reminds me the most of the cartoon hearts we used to draw on the little boxes we made in school for everyone to drop in those little boxed cards in. (I always like to adorn mine with sequins -- which aren't as sparkly after you get glue all over them -- and beads.)

So, Happy Valentine's Day, where ever in the solar system you may be.

Archive Post: Awesome ads and a good idea to boot

The above are two of the ads from the Girl Scouts Girls Go Tech campaign, and my particular favorites (I especially like the radio version of "Twinkle"). Click on the small versions to go to the full sized images at the AdCouncil website.

I was a Girl Scout (actually, a Brownie) for about all of two seconds in the late 1970s in Houston... which of course was long enough to sell cookies ... yuuummmmm.... thin mints.....

But, I digress. The goal of this campaign it to encourage interest in math and science in young girls, and even more importantly, to keep that interest alive in them as they grow older. The website isn't too in depth, but it does have a few good resources for encouraging girls in technology, math and science.

I've seen a huge variety of girls in the past 11 years that I've been doing astronomy education and outreach. Some are smart, confident and don't mind showing off what they know and others are shy and need enouragement to answer questions. I've seen three-year-olds able to recognize the moon through a telescope and I've seen teens that don't know the difference between a solar system, a galaxy and the Universe. And I've seen everything in between. But, I'm somewhat encouraged because I'm seeing more and more of the smart, confident type and I see more and more female undergrads and grad students coming into astronomy. I think the past few graduate classes we've admitted at UT are close to 50/50 male/female. I don't know as much about other fields, but at least astronomy seems to be making a little progress.

There isn't really any grand point to this post, I just wanted to link to those neat ads and ramble a little about something that I care about (for obvious reasons) - girls and women in science.

Archive Post: Carl Sagan

Ten years ago, we got the news that Carl Sagan had died of pneumonia, a side effect of his long battle with cancer. It felt almost like I had lost a friend, even though I had only once briefly been within two feet of him and had only been in the same room with him three times.

It's hard for me to make an eloquent summary of how Sagan impacted my life, so I'll just ramble about some of my favorite Carl Sagan books and shows.

I have had an interest in science, and astronomy in particular, for most of my life and "Cosmos" came along at a good time to nurture that. I remember seeing "Cosmos" when it was originally on (I was about 8 years old) and I still enjoy watching it today on TV and DVD. Even though some of the graphics have been updated, it is amazing how well the original information holds up after 25+ years. To this day I'm fascinated by Hypatia of Alexandria and her famous library because of that show. I kept hearing Sagan's voice the first time I saw the Rosetta stone at the British Museum, sounding out the letters of Ptolemy's name as he described how it was used to decipher Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs. The cartoon of the evolution of life from single-celled organisms to us was my introduction to the topic. The Cosmic Calendar, with the Big Bang at January 1 and human life at the final minutes of December 31 first showed me the awe of deep time. And how many people my age first knew what a googol was because of this show and not because of a search engine with the same name (although a different spelling)?

I first read "Contact" when I was 14 years old and a freshman in high school. At the time I wasn't absolutely sure what I wanted to do with my life, and after a side-track of wanting to be an astronaut I ended up studying astronomy in college. I didn't end up going all the way to a PhD, but I did get my Bachelor's degree in astronomy and I still work in the field doing educational support and public outreach at the University of Texas.

My final semester in college, I took a brilliant class called "Pseudoscience and the Paranormal" taught by one of our Physics professors and shortly after, Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" came along, which only strengthened and reinforced my ability to use my "skeptical toolbox". My favorite chapter is "The Dragon In My Garage". It precisely sums up the extent that people will go to hold on to beliefs. It reminds me of one of my favorite Sagan quotes: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". "Evidence" being the operative word.

It is hard to believe that it has been ten years since Sagan's death, and I wish he had lived longer to see the amazing developments in astronomy. But I'd like to think that he lives on in a way through the many people he has inspired over the years.

You can see other memories and thoughts on the life and work of Carl Sagan at Joel's Humanistic Blog at the Carl Sagan Memorial blog-a-thon.

Archive Post: The Beauty of Solar Burps

Part of my job is working with a solar telescope and talking about the sun with school kids, so I tend to keep up with solar activity. The sun has a roughly 11-year cycle where it goes from essentially no activity (meaning sunspots, flares, CMEs, etc.) to a bunch of activity and then back down to none. Right now we're at about the bottom, although activity is starting to creep back up and this week a large sunspot has produced several flares and CMEs. The cool thing about these eruptions is that when that energy impacts the Earth's atmosphere, it produces aurorae. Folks in more northerly areas are reporting and photographing some beautiful Northern Lights this week, and some have submitted the photos to the aurora gallery at one of my favorite websites, spaceweather.com.

Being in Texas, it is rare for us to see aurorae, but with particularly large explosions they can be seen. They are usually a red glow on the northern horizon (in my experience), not the rich variety of colors seen at more northern latitudes. Someday I'm going to be father north at the right time to see some!

The little movie at top is from the SOHO spacecraft, which monitors for solar activity everyday. This is the flare from December 14th and is at 195 Angstroms (the sun doesn't actually look green at that wavelength, it's just colored that way in the computer... that wavelength is in the ultraviolet and cannot be seen with the human eye).

Archive Post: Amazing Mars

You know, since I'm in astronomy for a living and there are all kinds of amazing images and discoveries coming in everyday, you'd think I would have been blogging about astronomy more. And since I love science in general, you'd think I'd be blogging about all science more too! Well, hopefully this post will be the first of many more to come of things that catch my eye.

Mars is currently being studied by five spacecraft, and until recently it was six (since Mars Global Surveyor seems to have gone bye-bye), so there has been no shortage of incredible images and science coming from the Red Planet recently. Of course, there was the water announcement last week, for starters. Then there are the rovers Spirit and Opportunity that keep on roving and sending back amazing pictures. And the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which has the highest resolution camera ever to photograph Mars onboard. Mars Odyssey is the fifth spacecraft for those keeping count.

The picture up top is the latest release from the Reconnaissance Orbiter. In addition to the incredible details and the interesting science from the image, it's just plain pretty to look at.

Archive Post: Busy day and not over yet... while coming down with a cold

Besides staying up way too long to watch election results last night, I have had a totally busy day today. Depending on where on you were, you may have been able to watch Mercury transit the sun. It's one of those types of astronomical events that some people find really neat and others can't figure out what the big deal is. In this case, Mercury is very small and it moves pretty slowly across the disk, but the alignment is fairly rare (the next one is 10 years away and the last one visible from Austin was in 1999). I've linked the above image to a photo I took of the image from our solar telescope at work. It's actually projecting against a wall, so it may look a little weird in places where the paint has chipped a little. All-in-all, it was a neat transit. Now I have the Venus transit of 2012 to look forward to!

And right now I'm sniffling my way through the night-time public viewing on our 16-inch telescope. It's a nice night and I've been clouded out for 4 weeks straight, so it's kind of nice to finally open up again. I just wish I didn't feel so terrible! The next few days at work should be slow (especially compared to today and the very busy few weeks I've had up to now), so hopefully I can take it easy...

Archive Post: Photos from the Air and Space Museums now up

Air & Space Dulles Photo Set | Air & Space Downtown Photo Set



The new Air and Space out at Dulles was absolutely wonderful for a space junkie like me. I also loved some of the old aircraft, especially the early Pan Am commercial airplane. Seeing the Enola Gay in one piece was neat too, since only half of it was in the American History Museum (I think...) 10 years ago, and the other have was getting restored at the Paul Garber facility. So, I have seen both halves separately and together now. Getting to see a space shuttle up close was pretty awesome too!

I had been to the downtown Air & Space nearly 10 years ago, but it was nice to get back there too. They had a new exhibit of the Wright Flyer and they have added the SpaceShip One - the first privately funded ship to go into space. I was also happy to get some better pictures of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Vega, since the photos I took last time didn't come out very good and I was quite disappointed. I took lots and lots of photos, but I just chose a few to put up on Flickr since the world only needs so many photos of an SR-71...