UCR PHYS 111 Blog

Saturday, January 28, 2012

Victorian Era Illustrations of Space

This is really cool. Check out this gallery of Victorian Era illustrations from the Harvard College Observatory. Here's Jupiter:

Friday, January 27, 2012

The Impending Dearth of Space Observatories

I mentioned this in class. Currently, there are a huge number of NASA-funded telescopes in space taking data for astronomers. But that's all about to change. Within the next couple of years, the telescopes will be rendered useless due to limitations both physical (eg. running out of cryogen), and fiscal. Check out the plot. In the last 10 years, we've been blessed with a large number of phenomenally powerful space telescopes. In the next ten years, there will far less data coming in. Fortunately, there's still plenty of science to do with the data we have. And the outlook for ground-based telescopes isn't quite so bleak, as ALMA and eVLA are both coming on line soon.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Big Glass in the News

NPR had a nice story on Morning Edition about the making of the mirrors for the next generation of optical/infrared telescopes.

Here's a picture of the glass pieces being arranged before being melted down.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Telescopes in Space!

Friend and colleague Jane Rigby, of the Goddard Space Flight Center, gives a TED talk on putting telescopes in space. It isn't cheap, but it is awesome.

Not Breaking News: Blogs Upset the Establishment

The NY Times has a piece on the growing trend of having high school and college students write blogs rather than term papers.

About the latter:

“This mechanistic writing is a real disincentive to creative but untrained writers . . .”

Agreed.