100 Hours of Astronomy Webcast Underway

An anonymous reader writes "As part of the International Year of Astronomy, the live video webcast Around the World in 80 Telescopes is taking place now, with fascinating live linkups with the world's leading observatories. The schedule for the webcast is available as a PDF and the recorded videos are available via the 100 hours of astronomy page"

Comments

Re:Year of Astronomy...

[ajs]

150 years since the publication of OoS just doesn't seem all that interesting to me. 400 years is a much rounder number.

In the year 2009, the world will celebrate the International Year of Astronomy as it commemorates the 400th anniversary of Galileoâ(TM)s use of a telescope to study the skies, and Keplerâ(TM)s publication of Astronomia Nova. 2009 is also the anniversary of many other historic events in science, including Huygenâ(TM)s 1659 publication of Systema Saturnium.This will be modern astronomyâ(TM)s quadricentennial, and the 2009 Year of Astronomy will be an international celebration of numerous astronomical and scientific milestones.

-- http://astronomy2009.us/

Space

[Anonymous Coward]

The final frontier...

Re:365 days of Astronomy Podcast

[wwphx]

Off-hand, I know of five in Southern/Central New Mexico: Apache Point, National Solar Observatory at Sun Spot, Very Large Array, Magdalena Ridge, the former Liquid Mirror Telescope installation just outside of Cloudcroft. There's also New Mexico Skies east of Cloudcroft, but that's a for-profit venture with large amateur models.

In Arizona, you've got Kitt Peak, Mount Graham, Lowell Observatory (Pluto discoverer), there's at least 1 more in Southern AZ but I can't think of the name. And usually these have multiple telescopes: Apache Point has my wife's 3.5 meter, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey 2 meter, and 1 meter and a .75(IIRC) meter, but the point is it has two haard-core science-grade installations, and it could get a third.

The important thing is the site. The spend, just surveying the sky optical quality, over a year studying it. Then the soil/geology studies. Can we build a big enough road up to it? Is there close enough housing and facilities? And a huge list of etceteras. So there's a lot more telescopes than there area observatories.

And they also have a pretty good size IT infrastructure with LOTS of linux admin geekery and programming to be done in a lot of different environments because each instrument's controlling computer is created by that instrument's scientists, so they talk in a number of different crazy ways. Apparently it's quite a challenge being an admin up there, I certainly don't have the chops for it (I'm a database guy).