Monthly Archives: August 2009

August 31, 2009

Mount Wilson Observatory – an update

hi, an update of my previous post. Despite the back fire set up by the firefighters last night, the station fire continued explanding and it is now less than 1/2 mile away from the observatory. :( Here a copy of the last post ...

August 30, 2009

Station fire nearby the Wilson Observatory and Jet propulsion Observatory

Hello, A station fire burning North of La Canada, nearby Los Angeles, CA, is moving toward the Wilson Observatory (MWO). This is a serious threat and for the moment the fire is supposed to reach the observatory on Sunday afternoon. The fire started ...

August 27, 2009

The Kition Planetarium and Observatory in Cyprus

Everyone who knows me will know how enthusiastic I am about astronomy, especially outreach and education. With this year being the International Year of Astronomy now is the perfect opportunity to give everyone, and I mean EVERYONE regardless of race, ...

August 26, 2009

The Virtual Telescope celebrates its 3rd Birthday – Live Event

To celebrate the Virtual Telescope's birthday, Gianluca Masi is holding a live event now through an internet webchat through the telescope's website, you can literally see live telescope images as the "live cosmic event/birthday pary" takes place. http://virtualtelescope.bellatrixobservatory.org/3rdbirthday/ The Virtual Telescope has ...

August 25, 2009

Unexpected work, but surprising results

The last few weeks I spent working on a new dataset given to me by a fellow colleague at ESO. It was an unexpected offer and I was initially unsure if I should take on the extra work which is ...

August 24, 2009

217P/LINEAR is breaking up or giving birth?

Hello from Hawaii, I am in vacation so this post will be brief. David Cardenosa from the Bootes Obs, Boecillo, Valladolid in Spain (observatory code J05) reported on the MPML list an unusual observation of the comet 217P/Linear, I thought some of ...

August 24, 2009

Kafeditepisemesta & The Challenge of Science Journalism

Kafeditepisemesta is the name of a discussion group of writers, editors, journalists, lecturers,  scientist, and so on; whose share the same concern, which is about how to popularize science for general public in a hilarious way. Seriously, the name 'kafeditepisemesta' ...

August 22, 2009

Visit to Vandenberg

WISE held a management team meeting at Vandenberg Air Force Base on Friday Aug 21. So I drove the 145 miles (230 km) from UCLA up to Lompoc, the closest town, and then another 8 miles (13 km) to ...

August 21, 2009

The discovery of a new triple asteroid – (93) Minerva

Hello, So I was quite mysterious after my observations at Keck Observatory, and I briefly mentioned that we discovered something interesting during the night. I will give a little bit more details in this blog since the IAU circular announcing the ...

August 19, 2009

WISE arrival

As Amy noted, WISE shipped out on August 12, and it arrived safely at Vandenberg on Friday August 14.