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http://iraf.noao.edu/iraf-homepage.html is the standard data processing package in American/British astronomy (and possibly Europe too these days). I just noticed it is packaged inside Debian...

Although aimed at astronomy, it would be useful general image processing (particularly good at automating procedures over many images).

The Deep Ecliptic Survey by Millis et al is finding Kuiper Belt objects by the dozen.

I guess this is true for all the photos if galaxies that we are shown. Horsehead nebula, whatever, I seem to remember all of them in more than one color. Does anyone know where to find un-colored images? I'd guess that they're either white or invisible.

Maybe they would... would.. would look like wood!

I found this "true color" image of the horsehead. It looks cool without any enhancements.

If you want to have a look at the same pic at *much* higher resolutions than the linked site offers, check out NOAO's great image gallery here.

The rest of the gallery is worth looking at as well.

There are astronomical institutions which are not degree-granting, but are in the .edu domain.

Gemini will not be an interferometer. For interferometry, you have to know the distance between the telescopes to an accuracy smaller than the wavelength used. Another thing is that you should either combine the beams from both telescopes, or get the phase information of each photon. In radio, it is possible to get the phase information. In optical, Keck and VLT can combine the beams. For Gemini, this would need quite a lot of optical fiber ;) The main goal of Gemini is to have identical state-of-the-art systems for observing both northern and southern sky.

IMHO X-ray astronomy is much more interesting, but I fear it will take some time before we get the X-ray interferometer, but I have heard some rumours on it.

Ground based Adaptive Optics currently does not produce very many pretty pictures. There are basically a number of technical reasons why, some of which will be ironed out in the short term and some of which will take a long time to solve (and involve things like batteries of lasers, which makes me think I will stop doing astronomy and start doing laser engineering if I am not careful.)

Anyway, for a cool adaptive optics astro pic done by people where I work, look here for Neptune and here for the moons of Jupiter. For some stars, and other cool stuff, check out this image of the galactic center.

Stars and planets are much easier with adaptive optics than are galaxies, though my housemate does galaxies wtih AO, because whenever you correct for atmospheric distortion, you never do a perfect job. The part of the beam of light that is not corrected can throw light all over your image. This means, if your object is not bright, a bright nearby thing could swamped it. And, in order to get adaptive optics to work, you have to have a bright nearby object to correct your image with. The solution is better adaptive optics systems, so for the mean time, Hubble will continue to surpass ground telescopes for image quality.

The Japanese name on the telescope is for the star cluster we call the Pleiades, or the seven sisters.

The funding for Subaru came mostly from the government of Japan through a number of universities, much like how telescopes such as the Gemini telescopes are built. In fact it is run by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the counterpart to the US's National Optical Astronomy Observatories. As the Japanese built it and paid for it, they can call it whatever they want. The only thing they have to do is give 15% of the time to observers at the University of Hawai'i.

Subaru's site is here and it has pictures, though the headquarters is on the big island (aka Hawai'i) and the net connection is slow.

The Japanese name on the telescope is for the star cluster we call the Pleiades, or the seven sisters.

The funding for Subaru came mostly from the government of Japan through a number of universities, much like how telescopes such as the Gemini telescopes are built. In fact it is run by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, the counterpart to the US's National Optical Astronomy Observatories. As the Japanese built it and paid for it, they can call it whatever they want. The only thing they have to do is give 15% of the time to observers at the University of Hawai'i.

Subaru's site is here and it has pictures, though the headquarters is on the big island (aka Hawai'i) and the net connection is slow.

There has been a plethora of research into massive black holes and their relationships to their respective galaxies. Of course most of the work is theoretical, but it is incredibly interesting!

The work is lead by a group of physicists who call themselves "nukers", and a lot of information can be found here.

The main questions that they have been struggling to answer are:
1) What factors about a galaxy do the size and mass of the blackhole at its center dictate?
and 2) Is it neccessary for a galaxy to have a blackhole at its center?

It is this first question which ties directly in with the rate of star formation and such material. If you're interested at all in the subject, I highly suggest checking out the links I provided above. (Yes, I'm too lazy to cut and paste the links again...)

--- I've been up for way too long, so I apologize if at times I made no sense. Just follow the links.

The Kill Your TV Website:

http://othello.localaccess.com/hardebeck/

No this is serious. He claims that Sesame Street may teach your kid to recognize letters and numbers, but it shortens their attention span.

It happens that, when I was a kid, I stopped watching television when my sister left for college. I had never really actively watched TV before, but would sit passively while she changed the channels. With my sister gone, I would at first just sit in silence in the empty house. But I started listening to music which, unlike TV, allows you to devote your attention to other things while you listen.

I read a lot, ground telescope mirrors, acted in the high school theater and eventually became the set director, started college at 16 while still attending high school, scored 890 out of a possible 900 on the SAT Math II achievement test and was accepted into CalTech, where I published in the astrophysical journal and did research on the 200" and 60" telescopes.

I still don't watch TV, and have a successful software consulting business.

Mike

Note - you can find refs to my papers in the "Publications" section of my resume. Abstracts are available online. I didn't say it in my original letter but the work that was published I did while employed as a research assistant the summer after my freshman year.

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Or rather, what can a larger optical telescope find better from Earth that we can't already find on other wavelengths and from other venues (i.e. The Hubble)?

Think about trying to blast an 8.4m mirror into space -- imagine how much fuel you'd have to expend and how much it would cost. I once read that one space shuttle mission costs up around a billion dollars per launch, the cost of the payload not withstanding.

The dual Gemini telescopes that NOAO and a group of others are putting together are nearly 4 times the size of HST. NGST, or the next generation space telescope is years away from being launched (2010, maybe?) and will only be 6.4m.

(For those who don't know, a bigger mirror means more light gathering power (ie, fainter objects.) and higher spatial resolution (things are less fuzzy), so it is in effect, possible to build ground telescopes that are big enough to out resolve HST, even after dealing with atmosphereic corrections.

(Also, fwiw, spain will be building a 15m on the canary isles soon.) There is also the Large Binocular Telescope in AZ that will be going on line in 5 years or so that will have 2 8m mirrors that have the resolution of 1 18m mirror, and will allow astronomers even higher resolution.

So, the say it in a line: space is not the end all and be all of optical astronomy, no matter what STScI wants you to believe.

Mayall is usually referred to as "Four Meter" which is approximately 157 inch. Whereas Hale is usually referred to as "200 Inch" which is approximately five meter. I wonder what actual diameters are, to a millimeter?
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It's cool that NASA is supporting Linux. But it is certainly true that the field of astronomy has been very Unix oriented for a long time (that is, for those who have given up their VAX systems already. :) )

Anotheuinr interesting thing about astronomy is the emphasis on open source software. Two of the most popular astronomical data analysis packages in the USA have been open source from the start.

The IRAF project (supported by the NSF) has been open source since it started in the early-mid 80's. It's primarily used for optical and infrared imaging and spectroscopy for ground-based and space-based observation, but it is also used for X-ray astronomy. Nearly all of the Hubble data is processed in IRAF.

Radio astronomers use the AIPS software, which is also open source and has been since its origin in 1978.

Both have supported Linux since about the time RedHat first appeared on the scene. Neither of these packages are recommended for non-specialists, but they are examples of free software which dominate a discipline.