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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"
Finally something that can put me to sleep at night.
Sig? No thanks. I don't smoke.
150 years since the publication of OoS just doesn't seem all that interesting to me. 400 years is a much rounder number.
-- http://astronomy2009.us/
Bah! Sorry about the character issues. Why Slashdot uses ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8 encoding, I have absolutely no clue. Follow the link, though, it has lots of good info.
Feel free to celebrate Darwin all you want. Nothing is there to stop you. Why is there this pervasive attitude around here that we have to choose one or another?
If I had to choose I would still go for astronomy. I bet you that astronomy has spurred many more people into taking up an interest in science more than evolution could ever imagine. Why do you think the vast majority of all science fiction is based on space? The rallying points for science set out there for the public needs to get a hold of people's imagination. Astronomy does that in spades.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
If you've got no imagination then yes, I suppose you'd find it disappointing. Me, I found it awe-inspiring, to think that this is a craft with up to six people on it, shooting across the sky at an incredible rate (30 minutes before it was on the other side of the world). Seeing the Shuttle just ahead of it, moving at the same speed on the same plane was the icing on the cake.
What were you expecting, dancing girls and a cool laser show?
She did Mythbusters' Apollo Landing Hoax episode last January (Dr. Russet McMillan, the APOLLO lunar laser stuff at the end) and now this! She's heading up the mountain this evening to do the Apache Point segment, but I understand they're having feed issues, so hard to say if the webcast portion is going to work very well. I'll probably wait and watch post-event streams.
(she did something else television-wise this January, but we can't talk about it and don't know when it will air)
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I hate to break it to you but that's pretty much what it looks like from anywhere else on Earth.
And just to forewarn you a bit, if you go to your local amateur astronomy observatory and expect to see through a telescope what you see on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website you're going to be in for even more of a disappointment.
Real astronomy isn't like what the movies show. It's unfortunate that you can't find the wonder in seeing what's essentially a few school buses tied together traveling at ~18000 MPH from a few hundred miles away. I guess some people really do need the eye candy.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Why do you think the vast majority of all science fiction is based on space?
Because alien chicks can have any arbitrary number of boobs.
Yeah, 150 years since OoS.
64 years since the first computer,
62 years since transistors were invented,
51 years since integrated circuits were invented,
38 years since Intel invented the 4004,
31 years since the first Apple ][s,
28 years since the first IBM PC,
25 years since the first Mac,
17 years since Bill and Lynne Jolitz released 386bsd,
And 17 years since Ken Thompson invented UTF-8.
But in the 21st Century, Slashdot still uses fricken ASCII
This is a fantastic idea, and a wonderful implementation. . . . not to mention that it is a great use of internet video streaming. Compared to all much the inane video junk available, this is truly educational and engrossing. When my kids get home form school in an hour or so, I am confident that this will be a wonderful for them to get exposed to contemporary science issues without realizing they are being more than just 'entertained'. Thank you for the post.
The IYA celebrates the 400th year of telescopic astronomy, which Galileo is credited with being the first to do.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
The final frontier...
Alien chicks do not have an arbitrary number of boobs; the number of breasts on a female alien is given by the formula Breasts = 2 + f(film) f(text) = 1 if the film in question is Total Recall and 0 otherwise.
You typed your zipcode into online submission form?
To be fair, that tells you when it will be overhead. You may still need to break out a compass with an inclinometer to find out where to actually expect it, and that can be a bit of work I suppose.
Of course, if you can get your bearings, you can make good estimations using nothing more than your own hands. Last time I tried (it's been a few years, come to think of it), I was able to estimate alt/az to within about 3-5 degrees... Not as good as many, but good enough for most things. Not everyone seems able to figure that out, though.
All those pop-up ads in the stream are really enlightening. Like the one about losing ugly belly fat that popped up while two bozos were talking about stars or some shit. The guy on the right was fat, and I'll bet he could really use the knowledge contained in that engrossing ad.
Yeah, this is stream is really driven by the desire educate people.
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
I keep having to click the close box on these asinine ads that block the bottom 3rd of the window. Anyone else finding them distracting?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Wow. Then in the future there will also be an arbitrary number of STDs
One man with a gun can control 100 without one
Enjoying the video stream, never realised there were so many observatories doing cool stuff. Also try the excellent podcast stream, one per day for the rest of the year.
http://365daysofastronomy.org/
(Yes I bought the tee shirt)
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I've worked at Gemini in the past. I've worked at UKIRT in the past. The two nights immediately preceding the event, I worked at Keck (although on the summit, not like those webcasting wimps down in Waimea). But every night of the webcast, I'm working at the UH 2.2-meter, formerly known as "THE Mauna Kea Observatory," which somehow managed to not get a slot - my boss claims there were a limited number of slots available and the bigger scopes snagged them all - and then get overlooked completely in the press releases that say "all" the Mauna Kea observatories were involved. Hmph.
So, rather than lull you to sleep with 15 minutes of video, how about a bullet list? ;)
* First large telescope to be fully computer-controlled.
* Second large telescope to have computer control work properly.
* Kuiper belt discovered here (1992 QB1, Dave Jewitt and Jane Luu)
* 45 of known 63 moons of Jupiter discovered here (Scott Sheppard, 2000-2004)
* "Main-Belt Comets" class of solar system bodies defined here (Henry Hsieh)
* Size and mass of transiting exoplanets measured 4x more accurately here (John A. Johnson)
* 50-60% of all announced supernova discoveries the last few years made here (Nearby Supernova Factory)
My operating shift this time features:
April 2 - Nick Moskovitz taking asteroid light curves in preparation for some Spitzer time
April 3 - Nearby Supernova Factory
April 4 - Dave Tholen, discoverer of the asteroid Apophis (remember to duck in 2029/2036)
April 5 - Eric Gaidos, UH geology and geophysics professor
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
It was actually 'under 12 parsecs'
The Kessel Run is an 18 parsec route.
A parsec is equal to roughly 3.26 light years.
"The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination"...
Crap. What a way to find out my imagination is non human.
Superb event, utilizing the power of streaming internet video to educate the people and inspire many more. I only came across this because of seeing the slashdot article, but I wish I saw this event being advertized/publicized on some news websites or on T.V.
The UStream.tv stuff seems broken. None if it will play with FF on Linux even with the Flash 9 player installed.
apt-get install redhat please god - Me (take it easy, I love Debian)
Not to mention this is the month of Easter, when we should really be focussed on Jesus Christ who died and was resurrected nigh on two millenia ago.
But a significant percentage of the population don't believe that Jesus Christ existed (or, if he did, that the stories about him are true). Pretty much everyone accepts that both Darwin and Galileo existed and did do what it is said they did - even those who disagree with their findings/thoughts/ideas.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
They do not have caching enabled. I have a slow internet connection. It is unwatchable. I get:
I am here at Ke.....ck observatory to sh....ow you what we d.......o here.
If they enable caching watch it. I could at least start the video several minutes early. That way I could at least understand it. But then, Oh no, I could capture the cache.
I am sorry I cannot watch it. I am sure it is very interesting. This is very lame.
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Actually, they're not using ASCII, they're using ISO-Latin-1, which, to be fair, is the default Western character set, so it's not totally unreasonable, just unfortunate for those of us who expect UTF-8 to be the default.
I would like to know who scheduled the 100 hours of astronomy while the moon was half full. If they wanted to look at the moon only (as it makes it near impossible to see deep space objects that are very interesting) why didn't they schedule it during a full moon. If they wanted to see deep space objects they should have chosen to have it during a new moon. Instead the worst of both worlds was chosen. This feels like a typical political decision.