astro
catdynamics | December 11, 2007The big NASA individual PI grants are being announced in time for the holiday shopping season...
Most of NASA's university PI based research and analysis is awarded through the ROSES annual omnibus Request for Proposals - the RfP typically comes out just after the State of the Union speech, with first deadline usually 90 days later, and a main "proposal season" in early summer, though some programs straggle through to the beginning of the following calendar year.
The Requests for Proposals for individual lines are often heavily amended, postponed or cancelled as the actual budget takes…
catdynamics | December 11, 2007The CoRoT team had a meeting, I wasn't there, but...
No press release, right now, someone must have confused "meeting" with "announcement". There are news, but I am firmly told that they are not announcing a terrestrial planet discovery or any such.
Be interesting to see what they have after the first look, any announcements at this point will be limited by the need to do ground based followup for confirmation.
The most interesting objects will be those showing clear periodic low amplitude variation with transit like profiles and no apparent velocity variation (since the first cut is to…
catdynamics | December 10, 2007Now do you believe in elves?
Santa Claus in Orion.
Got a long way to go still.
From ESA, XMM, via Spitzer
catdynamics | December 8, 2007Big F.U. from the Science and Technology Facilities Council to the astronomical community.
The UK STFC is expected to formally announce its final response to the 7% effective cut in its programs (after inflation and "Full Economic Costs") on Dec 11th.
(Hm, the UK is putting in its version of Full Cost Accounting - I am so sorry...)
The Royal Astronomical Societ and the Institute of Physics are fighting a rearguard action on the cuts, the most immediate being withdrawal from Gemini. Last week the RAS and IoP announced they would have a joint community meeting on the cuts on Dec 13th.
Today a…
catdynamics | December 5, 2007Moore money for Thirty Metre Telescope
The Moore Foundation just donated $200 million to Caltech and UC jointly to build the Thirty Metre Telescope - a successor to the Keck telescopes.
That is a lot.
Apparently with matches the total in the bank is now $300 million or so, so construction will presumably commence.
492 individually controlled 1.45m mirrors. Nice.
Adaptive optics. Six lasers for guide stars.
Good spatial resolution. Huge light bucket.
catdynamics | December 5, 2007"what's this dip over here?
Will the referee buy it?"
So this is what prolonged oxygen deprivation does to you?
Brilliant.
h/t Kayhan
catdynamics | December 3, 2007Coming soon.
For the unintiated, CoRoT is a French small space telescope, optimised for high precision relative photometry of bright stars observed in the optical.
Originally conceived as an astroseismology mission, to study the oscillations and variability of solar like stars in the neighbourhood, it was rescoped before launch to be optimised for detecting planetary transits.
It has been up for almost a year, made a token discovery announcement after the first short run, and recently completed its first "long stare", 150 days of observing a single patch of the sky, continuously.
It is…
catdynamics | November 28, 2007The Angry Physicist is really irate
He read Jacques' recent Musings on things Exceptionally Simple and was not amused.
Can I please first note that Lisi's infamous title is a PUN!
It is a joke, folks, and it is funny.
See, E8... it is an exceptional Lie group, and it is simple... argh. Never mind.
Now I might have let this slide, but even Chad is getting perturbed by all the negative vibes, so may I please remind people of some history.
Once upon a time: there were some bold imaginative young theorists, somewhat fresh out of grad school.
There was a newish theory around, that boldly proposed…
catdynamics | November 26, 2007UK announced it is withdrawing from Gemini
The Gemini twin telescopes, one in the "north" on Hawaii, and one south in Chile, are one of the few major (8-10m) optical/near-infrared telescope facilities.
The telescopes are a joint US (NSF national), UK, Canada, Chile, Australia, Argentina and Brazil effort, and are a major project, with multi-million dollar operating costs, hundreds of million dollar capital costs, and tens of million of dollars in instrumentation existing and under development.
From wainscoat.com
Earlier this month, the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council, the heir…
catdynamics | November 26, 2007He could buy his own 1% share in Gemini!
This, btw, confirms my belief that a secret cabal of astronomers will take over the University of California in its entirety in the near future.
I, personally, will welcome their new starry overlords.
catdynamics | November 22, 2007for all practical purposes we can do most physics under the assumption that space-time is locally flat
but it isn't.
Locally space-time has some curvature, but that doesn't matter so much.
Globally, there is also an issue, since we seem to live in a universe with a positive cosmological constant, and going off to infinity is not going to get us to a nice flat Minkowski space.
Technically, this confounds a lot of assumptions in physics, where it is assumed that there is some asymptotic flat space, over there somewhere, where everything is well defined, cleanly separated.
In practise, this…
catdynamics | November 19, 2007The blogosphere is a-twitter over surfer dude paper modestly titled An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything by Garrett Lisi
Just maybe he is onto something, but it is way overhyped
And so it is.
Lisi's homepage (currently severly slashdotted) and wiki
There is extensive discussion at Backreaction, here and some followup here
Woit also has something to say, as, of course, does Lubos
Sean, uncharacteristically, declines to comment, sensible chap.
So, like a fool, I tread there.
I was asked to nicely. It is late, and I may be doing some re-edits of this over the week, it is not a trivial…
catdynamics | November 16, 2007Chad, inspired by Mark's contradictions, asks for peoples' favourite dubious proofs.
Dave contributes some classics, but
Astronomers excel at dubious proofs.
Mathematicians despair of "physics proofs".
They lack rigour, shall we say. Often such trivia as uniqueness, or even existence are omitted, and we proceed with "whatever works".
My favourite, which I recently used in class, is a variation on the Ansatz (dumb things always sound better in foreign languages).
I derived a a set of evolution equations to first order, noted that by inspection they were formally an insoluble set of coupled…
catdynamics | November 14, 2007so... does anyone know if signatures drawn using Adobe Illustrator, or equivalent, count?
yes it is mini-proposal season and the e-mails and faxed are humming
I actually played with illustrator to see if I could do a convincing signature writing with a mouse - couldn't quite pull it off and was reduced to finding a working scanner - we've gone rapidly from The One Precious Scanner, too scanners littering every desktop, to The One Precious Scanner Which Still Works
Funny that
'cause scanned sigs pasted into PDFs count, which seems slightly risque, espcially given federal agencies proclivity…
catdynamics | November 14, 2007Kaguya images rock!
Bonus added earthrise video
Click for hi-res
wide angle view
all the new images
catdynamics | November 12, 2007minor scare on the Minor Planet Circulars the other day
an apparent new object, 2007 VN84 was tagged as a potential impactor, with an estimated closest approach of 12,000 km or less - two Earth diameters.
IAUC 20 issues an alert. - The relevant column is "Delta" - distance from Earth in AU
It was a false alarm.
See editorial notice from the MPC They blame the Satellite Situation Center on failing to provide timely orbital elements. ESA, to be fair, does provide a position update, including a where is it now web page
See also Planetary Society Blog
The apparent new Near Earth Asteroid was…
catdynamics | November 8, 2007Kaguya, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency's lunar explorer, is taking pretty pictures
In HDTV
Have to confess I am missing something here, since the pixel count is underwhelming, but it has been a long time... and the pics are awful pretty.
Couldn't get the movie sequence to run on Safari, regrettably. I blame Bill Gates.
catdynamics | November 8, 2007Periodic Comet 17P/Holmes just brightened by 15 magnitudes overnight
That means it went from boringly dim, to being naked eye visible, and it is high in the northern sky, a nice target for binoculars or small telescope if you have cold clear skies and a view to the north.
The Space Fellowship has directions
wikipedia has the gory details and pretty pictures