What would be really neat is an ATV downlink on UHF so we could watch it. I've always wanted to see the transition where the blue sky disappears.
Check out Cosmocam'sYouTube feed. It's a project of the CSBF to allow people (mostly students) to interact with a camera aboard a high altitude balloon. In their case, the balloons can go much higher and longer than Cornell's. CSBF's balloons can reach 120,000 feet (37 km) and have flown for >50 days.
That's simple. Just stick to identifying galaxies that are more than 100 light years away and you will be relativistically safe. Your children's children's children on the other hand...
Heh, I'll bite. Actually, this is version 2 (which came out 2 days ago). The original Galaxy Zoo was launched in July 2007, and only classified galaxies as spiral or not. This is much more fine-grained and allows for significantly better research.
And seriously, 6 jobs in the last 18 months. C'mon!
If you'd like a preview, check out the results from BLAST (more results and even prettier pictures coming out very soon). Although it only has a 1.8 meter mirror, it has the same version of detectors that the SPIRE instrument on Herschel uses. To be cheaper and faster, BLAST flys on a high-altitude balloon platform. Slashdot has covered it in the past. And there's a documentary about BLAST as well (also covered by slashdot).
Not fully. Spitzer is mostly a shorter wavelength (best at 1-25 microns) observatory than Herschel (best at 200-600 microns). You can understand vastly different things with that difference in wavelengths.
True. But the oldest galaxies (what Herschel is mainly designed to look at) don't emit in the visible, even in their own (rest) frame. That's because the earliest galaxies are very dusty, and all this dust is opaque to the visible light. The stars are still there, glowing away, but their light is absorbed by this dust. This absorption heats the dust, warming it to 35K (give or take), which, as all things with non-zero temperature do, emits radiation like a blackbody. This light is then redshifted such that it's blackbody spectrum peaks in the submillimeter, which is what Herschel looks at.
Disclaimer: I work on BLAST, a balloon-borne experiment (cheaper than a satellite) which has detectors nearly identical to the ones of the SPIRE (main) instrument on Herschel.
True, but JWST and Herschel are looking at vastly different wavelengths of light (mostly visible and near-IR as compared to submillimeter) so they really compliment each other. JWSTis a replacement for Hubble in the truest sense of the word. The article is misleading in it's claim that Herschel is a replacement for Hubble.
However, if you do the math, you'll see that even the earliest possible galaxies (redshift = z = 10 (or less)) don't get visible light redshifted into the submillimeter (where Herschel looks). This is because the earliest galaxies are very dusty, and this dust obscures most of the visible light coming from the stars. However, to obscure the light, the dust is absorbing the energy, heating the dust up (to about 35K give or take) and this dust re-radiates at like 10-100 microns or so, which is redshifted into the submillimeter (200-600 microns) that Herschel looks at.
I work on a precursor to the SPIRE instrument (a major instrument on Herschel, called BLAST which flew on a high-altitude balloon (you need to get about the atmosphere to look in the submillimeter and balloons are way cheaper than sattelites).
And it's not really a Spitzer replacement, as it's looking at mostly longer wavelengths than Spitzer. It complements both. Virtually all different wavelengths are worth looking at as they all tells us unique things.
Herschel, mostly with the SPIRE instrument, will be looking at the earliest star forming galaxies. A nearly identical instrument to SPIRE was flown on a high-altitude balloon, BLAST, which got Slashdotcoverage as well.
I hate to be a lame AOL'er, but "me too" where me is all the people I work with: software is GPL, try to encourage people to cite (or in many cases just put a quick mention in the acknowledgements) any appropriate papers when publishing.
A (marginally) interesting counter-example is healpix, code used by astronomers for all sky maps (especially of CMB data, its original use case). It was originally released with such a citation clause, which caused much annoyance among people who wanted to use the code for little things, as well as make it difficult (impossible) to incorporate into existing astronomical software which is Free (GPL'ed etc.). Cooler heads prevailed, and the restriction has since been rescinded, although they still request attribution in the same manner as they had required before.
If all the "improvements" to solar cell manufacturing I have read about in recent decades became actuality, we would all have homes and cars powered solely by a 1-meter-square panel on the roof and the panels would cost $1 apiece.
Hmmm. We'd need other advances as well. Forgetting the fact that there are clouds some of the time and the sun is below the horizion about half of the time, and assuming that the roof of your house/car is pointed squarely at the sun at all times (slightly possible if you have pointed arrays) what would a 1 square meter array give you. Well, with 100% efficiency we'd get all of the ~1400 W/m^2 that the sun bathes us in. Multiply by the 1 m^2 array we get, (whew, tough math) 1400W.
For your car, that's (thankyou google calculator) a little less than 2 horsepower. Sure, you could save up some power in batteries, but 2 HP is certainly not sufficient for cars running on todays roads in todays traffic. It's impressive how much stuff you could power off your car (even if you have a very small car) if you hooked a generator up to it. It takes alot to change the momentum of ~1000kg amalgamation of man and machine.
As for your house, if you totally cut back on pretty much everything you use (including your computer to post comments on/.) you might be able to get away with that. (And if you weren't so whiny and insist on only 1 square meter, and installed PV arrays over all of your roof you'd be doing great). And that's assuming you live in a mystical place where the sun is up 24 hours a day (and 365 days a year).
Actually, that link is to the old trailer (actually, it's too long to be called a trailer, so ummm, call it promotional footage). Anyways, why not check out both (new trailer)
PS - I did bug the filmmakers about their lack of other options (over quicktime alone), and although they agreed to put up something else, they put it really low on their priority list.
I'm sure some of the researchers are at McMurdo, and haven't yet gone home to their respective institutions.
I was there last year to help launch BLAST, which was up in the air at the same time as two other experiments, ANITA and SBI. Wait, that's also 3 simultaneous experiments. Weird record. I guess they didn't count SBI last year since it has pointing issues and they terminated the flight within 12 hours since it was unable to get any science. I felt bad for them. But there were 3 balloons up at the same time (that was a first for Antarctica).
True, and all the balloons launched from Antarctica (or Northern Sweden when under CSBF control) are put on test flights from places like Palestine, Texas and Ft. Sumner, New Mexico first (like this one). Check out the CSBFwebpage for more info.
And a shameless plug to a previous slashdot article on the most recent launch of BLAST, another balloon-borne telescope.
As a scientist who has worked on other (unrelated) balloon telescopes (launched by the same CSBF crew), I can tell you that the balloon is about 1000-2000kg of dry-cleaner bag plastic. Upon termination, it wads up into a big mess. They do recover it if they can find it (they usually can except in the case of flights in Antarctica where it is difficult to locate), but it is not recycled or reused in any way, it's trash. CSBF does aim to recover absolutely everything that they launch. A previous slashdot article (which I shamelessly plug as I submitted it) has more much more info, including some blogs of previous flights and the threads there answer many questions people have.
For those of you actually reading this far down in the thread, follow the link to the slashdot article about the BLAST balloon. It includes several links which may be of interest, including a few photo blogs from the people who are actually involved in these types of balloon launches.
The real question is, is the problem DST related, or is it a coincidence?
Sure, it happened around the day of the change. Sure, they were pretty flip about responding to peoples' questions about their DST change readyness. But is it fair to jump to the conclusion that it [the outage] is because of the new DST rules? It could be that they are incompetent in other ways.;-)
So does that mean video taken from penguin-cam could mistake this object for a UFO ?
Maybe. But since BLAST is not moving very fast relative to its distance from the penguin, BLAST will appear to be stationary. Not typical of UFOs, wouldn't you say? It'll look more like a tiny blob of a cloud in the distance on the camera. Barely a speck.
Well, let's assume that the penguin is as close as she can get to the balloon, ie directly below it. The balloon is about 40km up, and is about 200m in diameter (give or take), which is about 17 arcminutes. Not huge. Now, let's say the camera on the penguin has a field of view of 50 degrees. It's probably even wider, as you want to see stuff close to and around the penguin, but we'll use 50. If we have a low-res camera, say 1024x768, that gives us 3 arcminutes per pixel, so sure, it'll show up as a blob of a few or so pixels. As for brightness, I know from personal experience that the balloon will be about as bright as the sky, but white instead of blue. So the camera had better be color.
Since the webcam is off (and slashdot couldn't link to it anyway), here's a link of a small movie (taken with a small digital camera) of the launch. It's from Don's blog, which covers the entire campaign.
What's the odds we'll see this reported as a UFO story on Unsolved Mysteries in a few years ?
Well, like already pointed out, not too many people live in Antarctica, so not too many. But these types of balloons are launched relativly often from other locations as well, and some of the time, yes, they are reported as UFOs. When BLAST flew its test flight from Ft. Sumner, NM, it was reported as a UFO in the Santa Fe area after it flew overhead just after dark. The balloon is easy to see in the daytime, but is very small, so hard to notice. Just after dark (on the ground), the balloon is still in the sunlight (since it is so high), and therefore lit up and hard to miss. In fact, this photo was taken by an amateur astronomer (Joe Martz) in Santa Fe of BLAST at float (the same time people were calling it in as a UFO).
Slashdot Mirror
What would be really neat is an ATV downlink on UHF so we could watch it. I've always wanted to see the transition where the blue sky disappears.
Check out Cosmocam's YouTube feed. It's a project of the CSBF to allow people (mostly students) to interact with a camera aboard a high altitude balloon. In their case, the balloons can go much higher and longer than Cornell's. CSBF's balloons can reach 120,000 feet (37 km) and have flown for >50 days.
That's simple. Just stick to identifying galaxies that are more than 100 light years away and you will be relativistically safe. Your children's children's children on the other hand...
Ummm, which galaxies are closer than 100 light years?
Heh, I'll bite. Actually, this is version 2 (which came out 2 days ago). The original Galaxy Zoo was launched in July 2007, and only classified galaxies as spiral or not. This is much more fine-grained and allows for significantly better research.
And seriously, 6 jobs in the last 18 months. C'mon!
If you'd like a preview, check out the results from BLAST (more results and even prettier pictures coming out very soon). Although it only has a 1.8 meter mirror, it has the same version of detectors that the SPIRE instrument on Herschel uses. To be cheaper and faster, BLAST flys on a high-altitude balloon platform. Slashdot has covered it in the past. And there's a documentary about BLAST as well (also covered by slashdot).
Disclaimer: I work on the BLAST project.
Not fully. Spitzer is mostly a shorter wavelength (best at 1-25 microns) observatory than Herschel (best at 200-600 microns). You can understand vastly different things with that difference in wavelengths.
True. But the oldest galaxies (what Herschel is mainly designed to look at) don't emit in the visible, even in their own (rest) frame. That's because the earliest galaxies are very dusty, and all this dust is opaque to the visible light. The stars are still there, glowing away, but their light is absorbed by this dust. This absorption heats the dust, warming it to 35K (give or take), which, as all things with non-zero temperature do, emits radiation like a blackbody. This light is then redshifted such that it's blackbody spectrum peaks in the submillimeter, which is what Herschel looks at.
Disclaimer: I work on BLAST, a balloon-borne experiment (cheaper than a satellite) which has detectors nearly identical to the ones of the SPIRE (main) instrument on Herschel.
True, but JWST and Herschel are looking at vastly different wavelengths of light (mostly visible and near-IR as compared to submillimeter) so they really compliment each other. JWST is a replacement for Hubble in the truest sense of the word. The article is misleading in it's claim that Herschel is a replacement for Hubble.
However, if you do the math, you'll see that even the earliest possible galaxies (redshift = z = 10 (or less)) don't get visible light redshifted into the submillimeter (where Herschel looks). This is because the earliest galaxies are very dusty, and this dust obscures most of the visible light coming from the stars. However, to obscure the light, the dust is absorbing the energy, heating the dust up (to about 35K give or take) and this dust re-radiates at like 10-100 microns or so, which is redshifted into the submillimeter (200-600 microns) that Herschel looks at.
I work on a precursor to the SPIRE instrument (a major instrument on Herschel, called BLAST which flew on a high-altitude balloon (you need to get about the atmosphere to look in the submillimeter and balloons are way cheaper than sattelites).
And it's not really a Spitzer replacement, as it's looking at mostly longer wavelengths than Spitzer. It complements both. Virtually all different wavelengths are worth looking at as they all tells us unique things.
Herschel, mostly with the SPIRE instrument, will be looking at the earliest star forming galaxies. A nearly identical instrument to SPIRE was flown on a high-altitude balloon, BLAST, which got Slashdot coverage as well.
Disclaimer: I work on the BLAST project.
I hate to be a lame AOL'er, but "me too" where me is all the people I work with: software is GPL, try to encourage people to cite (or in many cases just put a quick mention in the acknowledgements) any appropriate papers when publishing.
A (marginally) interesting counter-example is healpix, code used by astronomers for all sky maps (especially of CMB data, its original use case). It was originally released with such a citation clause, which caused much annoyance among people who wanted to use the code for little things, as well as make it difficult (impossible) to incorporate into existing astronomical software which is Free (GPL'ed etc.). Cooler heads prevailed, and the restriction has since been rescinded, although they still request attribution in the same manner as they had required before.
Best. Tag. Ever!
If all the "improvements" to solar cell manufacturing I have read about in recent decades became actuality, we would all have homes and cars powered solely by a 1-meter-square panel on the roof and the panels would cost $1 apiece.
/.) you might be able to get away with that. (And if you weren't so whiny and insist on only 1 square meter, and installed PV arrays over all of your roof you'd be doing great). And that's assuming you live in a mystical place where the sun is up 24 hours a day (and 365 days a year).
Hmmm. We'd need other advances as well. Forgetting the fact that there are clouds some of the time and the sun is below the horizion about half of the time, and assuming that the roof of your house/car is pointed squarely at the sun at all times (slightly possible if you have pointed arrays) what would a 1 square meter array give you. Well, with 100% efficiency we'd get all of the ~1400 W/m^2 that the sun bathes us in. Multiply by the 1 m^2 array we get, (whew, tough math) 1400W.
For your car, that's (thankyou google calculator) a little less than 2 horsepower. Sure, you could save up some power in batteries, but 2 HP is certainly not sufficient for cars running on todays roads in todays traffic. It's impressive how much stuff you could power off your car (even if you have a very small car) if you hooked a generator up to it. It takes alot to change the momentum of ~1000kg amalgamation of man and machine.
As for your house, if you totally cut back on pretty much everything you use (including your computer to post comments on
That's what I get for not fully checking the preview. Thanks for being my own personal grammar Nazi.
Actually, that link is to the old trailer (actually, it's too long to be called a trailer, so ummm, call it promotional footage). Anyways, why not check out both (new trailer)
PS - I did bug the filmmakers about their lack of other options (over quicktime alone), and although they agreed to put up something else, they put it really low on their priority list.
I'm sure some of the researchers are at McMurdo, and haven't yet gone home to their respective institutions.
I was there last year to help launch BLAST, which was up in the air at the same time as two other experiments, ANITA and SBI. Wait, that's also 3 simultaneous experiments. Weird record. I guess they didn't count SBI last year since it has pointing issues and they terminated the flight within 12 hours since it was unable to get any science. I felt bad for them. But there were 3 balloons up at the same time (that was a first for Antarctica).
I think I'm going to be sick.
True, and all the balloons launched from Antarctica (or Northern Sweden when under CSBF control) are put on test flights from places like Palestine, Texas and Ft. Sumner, New Mexico first (like this one).
Check out the CSBFwebpage for more info.
And a shameless plug to a previous slashdot article on the most recent launch of BLAST, another balloon-borne telescope.
As a scientist who has worked on other (unrelated) balloon telescopes (launched by the same CSBF crew), I can tell you that the balloon is about 1000-2000kg of dry-cleaner bag plastic. Upon termination, it wads up into a big mess. They do recover it if they can find it (they usually can except in the case of flights in Antarctica where it is difficult to locate), but it is not recycled or reused in any way, it's trash. CSBF does aim to recover absolutely everything that they launch. A previous slashdot article (which I shamelessly plug as I submitted it) has more much more info, including some blogs of previous flights and the threads there answer many questions people have.
I hate to reply to my own post, but...
For those of you actually reading this far down in the thread, follow the link to the slashdot article about the BLAST balloon. It includes several links which may be of interest, including a few photo blogs from the people who are actually involved in these types of balloon launches.
Not only are they not new, but reporting them on slashdot isn't as well.
BLAST Balloon
The real question is, is the problem DST related, or is it a coincidence?
;-)
Sure, it happened around the day of the change. Sure, they were pretty flip about responding to peoples' questions about their DST change readyness. But is it fair to jump to the conclusion that it [the outage] is because of the new DST rules? It could be that they are incompetent in other ways.
So does that mean video taken from penguin-cam could mistake this object for a UFO ?
Maybe. But since BLAST is not moving very fast relative to its distance from the penguin, BLAST will appear to be stationary. Not typical of UFOs, wouldn't you say? It'll look more like a tiny blob of a cloud in the distance on the camera. Barely a speck.
Well, let's assume that the penguin is as close as she can get to the balloon, ie directly below it. The balloon is about 40km up, and is about 200m in diameter (give or take), which is about 17 arcminutes. Not huge. Now, let's say the camera on the penguin has a field of view of 50 degrees. It's probably even wider, as you want to see stuff close to and around the penguin, but we'll use 50. If we have a low-res camera, say 1024x768, that gives us 3 arcminutes per pixel, so sure, it'll show up as a blob of a few or so pixels. As for brightness, I know from personal experience that the balloon will be about as bright as the sky, but white instead of blue. So the camera had better be color.
Since the webcam is off (and slashdot couldn't link to it anyway), here's a link of a small movie (taken with a small digital camera) of the launch. It's from Don's blog, which covers the entire campaign.
What's the odds we'll see this reported as a UFO story on Unsolved Mysteries in a few years ?
Well, like already pointed out, not too many people live in Antarctica, so not too many. But these types of balloons are launched relativly often from other locations as well, and some of the time, yes, they are reported as UFOs. When BLAST flew its test flight from Ft. Sumner, NM, it was reported as a UFO in the Santa Fe area after it flew overhead just after dark. The balloon is easy to see in the daytime, but is very small, so hard to notice. Just after dark (on the ground), the balloon is still in the sunlight (since it is so high), and therefore lit up and hard to miss. In fact, this photo was taken by an amateur astronomer (Joe Martz) in Santa Fe of BLAST at float (the same time people were calling it in as a UFO).