Step one in telescope mirror care: Don't shoot it with a gun.

At the time of the incident, I believe the Harlan Smith Telescope was only two years old and one of the largest telescopes in the world.  Read about it here.

The Exponential Growth Assumption

The NY Times just posted an article stating that a steady-state (no growth) economy is unconscionable and therefore should not be considered when discussing the effects on the environment and climate change.  But this ignores the fact that economic growth has always required additional energy (and other resource) use.  

Some (including me) argue that exponential growth is simply untenable.  If not now, then very soon.  Tom Murphy, a Physics Professor at UCSD has looked at the available energy to us on Earth (or in the Solar System) to determine how much growth we could sustain.  Check it out.

New Visualization of Known Exoplanet Systems

Check it out:

The Search for Another Earth

Here is a fantastic 19-minute video by NASA telling the history of exoplanet discoveries, and inspiring us for the future missions.  It's really well done.

Watch it.  And consider being part of it.

Neptune in Retrograde

The new Kepler mission, K2, happened to point at Neptune for two months earlier this year.  Take a look.  You can see Neptune (first in retrograde),  its moon Triton, and actually the much smaller moon Nereid as well.  I'm not sure, but the fast moving objects that zip across the field of view are likely asteroids in the asteroid belt.

Change the Blackbody Temperature of Your Screen (sort of)

I read this article about how the blue lights of LEDs in our computers and phones is keeping us from sleeping and destroying our retinas.  But it suggested a solution, a free app you can download to change the "temperature" of your device after sunset (or whenever) to have less blue light in the evening.  It's called f.lux and I've been using it for the last two days.  As I'm sitting here on my laptop (during your midterm) the screen slowly got less blue and more yellow because the sun had set.  I think it's great.  You can choose the effective blackbody temperature of your screen before and after sunset.  I'm using 4000 K after sunset and 5900 K during the day.

Though it changes the hue (the wavelength dependence), I'm pretty sure it's not changing the flux per unit area by T^4.  ;-)

JWST - The Transformer Telescope

Check out this video animation of all of the "deployments" that will (hopefully) occur as the James Webb Space Telescope races to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L2). It'll ultimately be a million miles from Earth with no possibility of an astronaut going to fix it.  What could go wrong?

Exoplanet Travel Bureau

NASA has created a bunch of travel posters to promote tourism on newly found exoplanets.  Check them out here.

Apollo Image Archive

All of the 8400 images from the Apollo missions have been put on Flickr, and people are making some pretty cool videos from them. More info here.

Your Blogs: Fall 2015

Here are the links to each of your blogs.  I will add them as I receive them.  Click, follow, read, comment.

Michael Arnold
Hoon Cho
Kyu Choi
Jason Chow
Nelson Garcia
Jorge Huizar
Allan Kim
Adam Lane
Camille Loui
Dominic Martinez-Ta
Zachary Mitchell
Aaron Morefield
Kevin Nepanuceno
Brian Palacio
Sasha Pierce
Christopher Snapp-Kolas

Lunar Eclipse This Sunday!

You're in luck!  The Earth will pass directly between the Sun and the Moon this Sunday evening (Sept. 27th), producing a lunar eclipse. The last one until 2018! The astronomy group at UCR will be hosting a viewing with telescopes.  Check it out.  More info here:

http://astro.ucr.edu/lunar-eclipse-viewing/

The Sun in Hydrogen Balmer - Alpha

For those of you still following this blog.  You may remember from class that looking at the Sun at a wavelength where the absorption cross section is high means that we are seeing a shallower surface of the Sun.  Well Astronomy Picture of the Day has a great shot of the Sun in Hydrogen - Balmer Alpha (6562.8 Angstroms).  Check it out!

Regulus to Disappear Next Wednesday (for some)

This is really cool.  A very bright (m_v = 1.4) star is going to disappear because of an asteroid occultation.  That in itself is cool, but the science that can be done with it is exceptional.  This occultation will only happen for people around New York and points NW and SE of it.  Now, imagine if you had thousands of people at different points all looking to determine when the star disappeared. If they all record the time (and their GPS position) of the disappearance and reappearance of the star, they can essentially map the structure of the asteroid.

Check out the records from previous occultations (of a double asteroid 90 Antiope and a single asteroid 704 Interamnia.  The different lines show when different people could see the star.  The dark spots show when they couldn't.  So now we know the shapes of those asteroids!  Much more good information at Sky and Telescope.

Scale of the Solar System

I don't think I've ever seen such a great demonstration of the scale of the universe!  Check it out!

COSMOS Remix

There is a mini-series called Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey which begins Sunday (9/8c on Fox, 10/9c on National Geographic).  If you're not familiar, this is redoing an incredibly successful 1980 mini-series by Carl Sagan.  The science, and the graphics have changed a lot since then.  This appears to be a big, expensive, flashy, production (Seth McFarlane is the executive producer).  Every question on the final will be from the mini-series.  That's not really true, but I really want you to watch it.

Lots of New Planets

The NASA Kepler mission just tripled the number of confirmed Kepler planets with an announcement this morning.  715 new planets!!

Michelson's Famous Experiment in the San Gabriel Mountains

KCET has a nice article about Michelson's clever experiment to measure the speed of light.  The experiments happened nearly 90 years ago by sending a beam of light from Mt. Wilson to Mt. Baldy and reflecting it back.  More info here.

Type Ia Supernova in M82

M82, a very close by "starburst" galaxy, just had a Type Ia supernova go off a few days ago.  This is the closest Type Ia in a long time.

http://www.universetoday.com/108386/bright-new-supernova-blows-up-in-nearby-m82-the-cigar-galaxy/

Your Blogs

Here is a list of your fellow student's blogs:

Gerardo Alvarez
Javier Fajardo
Melina Fuentes
Te-En Lee
Vincent Luong
Salvador Martinez
Jacob McNevin
Hieu Nguyen
Oscar Osario
Ziqi Pi
Ethan Roeder
John Stephens

Interactive Scale of the Universe

Here's a nice interactive graphic attempting to help you visualize the massive range of scales of the universe.  As you zoom in and out, the scale is on the bottom, right (as an exponential).  There are a few inaccuracies (the galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field were NOT 12.7 billion light years away 12.7 billion years ago).  But the graphics are really nice.  Zoom out!  Our class deals with everything > 10^7 meters across.