Einstein, Meet Canseco

Jose Canseco Just Explained Gravity to the Internet

As he said, he may not be 100% right.  Keep that in mind.

This is awesome.

Collective Motion of Moshers at Heavy Metal Concerts

"the measured speed distribution in mosh pits was well fit by the equilibrium speed distribution of classical 2D gasses otherwise known as the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution"

 

Google gives a shout out to Copernicus

Check out the google doodle today, celebrating Nicolaus Copernicus' birthday.  More info here.

An asteroid/meteor expert has written about her estimates of the size of the recent meteor over Chelyabinsk, Russia.  The estimate is that the object has a diameter of ~15 m and the blast had an energy equivalent to ~300 killatons of TNT.  Wow.  

Lucky Imaging

This is a nice little video of an amateur astronomer using a technique - "lucky imaging" - that astronomer's are using more and more.  The technique basically takes advantage of the fact that, if you take very short exposures (< 10 ms), occasionally the distortion from seeing is not large.  So if you can take a large number of exposures and only use the sharpest 5-10% of them, you can get an image that is much higher resolution.  Sometimes it can even approach the diffraction limit.  Of course, the method has a downside in that you have to throw away most of the images, most of the photons.  But if the objects you're photographing are bright, you can get away with it.

This is awesome.  Six month exposures of the sky with a pinhole camera (in a beer can) show the changing path of the sun with the season.

http://www.treehugger.com/slideshows/gadgets/diy-beer-can-pinhole-camera-takes-6-month-long-exposures-photos/

You were all wondering, and now you know...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21150721

Celestial Sphere App

Hi all,

I just wanted to let you know that if you're having a hard time visualizing the celestial sphere when you look up in the night sky, well, there's an app for that.  In fact there are scores of apps that use your position and orientation to show you what is in the night sky behind your smart phone (or tablet).

The app I use is called Pocket Universe.  You can turn on a grid of lines of constant RA and Dec to help you visualize the night sky.

Hope this helps!

Not good!

The Kepler mission to find exoplanets has just gone into safe mode because one of the reaction wheels (needed to point and stabilize the telescope) is acting up.  If the reaction wheel fails, the mission may be lost, apparently.

I know the Hubble Space Telescope has survived with only two reaction wheels, but maybe the requirements are different with Kepler.  Not good.

More on the Kepler mission in class...

Your Blogs (Winter 2013)

I'll post the URLs of everybody's blogs here as I receive them.

Louis Bran - The Starry Night
Lisa Cahn - Ex Astris Scientia
Chenise Chapin - Bugdar AstroQuest
Louise Daniels - 21eleven
Robbie Dunn - Astronomy Awesomeness
Alina Escalera - The Mad Physi
Erick Membreno - Astronomy and Astrophysics
Aron Pedigo - Physics 111
Sarah Smolenski - Universal Musings
Paul Solleveld - Mostly Incorrect
Mahmoud Tahir - Artistry of Astronomy
George Vejar - Up and Atom!
Tollian Waite - The Everlasting Symphony

New Quarter!

Welcome to Physics 111!  20% of your grade will involve blogging about astronomy topics.  The topics can be from recent news, science fiction, lecture, or anything of interest to you.  Just blog about something interesting and astronomy-related and try to teach yourself and your classmates (and probably me) something in the process.  Only one blog is assigned and that is the first one.  Right a short description (a few paragraphs) of what you think the work of a modern astronomer entails.

The previous posts are from the blog I maintained during last winter's class.  Feel free to look through it and get some ideas.